CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I woke screaming.

Hey, you try riding along in a dead princess’s body as she castrates a man, and see what you do, all right?

Speedy twitched in his sleep. I nearly woke him up to talk over Helen’s most recent dream-memory, but thought better of it. He was done with Greece. I needed to get him to his home territory before he started getting dangerously irritable. Emphasis on dangerous.

I tied my hair back, threw on some clothes, and went downstairs.

Mike found me in the bar an hour later. I had a large glass of whiskey in one hand, and those three little beads on their new lanyard in the other. The beads had stopped chirping at me days ago. I wasn’t sure if I was happy or sad about that. I guess I was hoping the liquor would tell me.

Mike sat down beside me, and held up two fingers to the bartender. He waited until his own whiskey arrived before he nudged me with his elbow.

“You okay?”

I nodded. I was three shots into a decent buzz, and feeling much better than I had when I had woken up with somebody else’s memory of slicing a scrotum off with a dagger.

I told Mike about the dream.

To say that he flinched would belittle the subtle art of flinching. Instead, I’ll say he placed his drink on the bar, ordered another double, and drank all three glasses—both of his and mine—without tasting any of them.

“Yep,” I said. “That.”

“Dear Lord,” he said. “We’ve got to get her to stop sending you these dreams.”

“I don’t think she’s going to stop until I do something for her,” I began, as the bartender swept away our glasses and replaced them with new ones. “It’s like what Speedy told me—she’s sending them for a reason. She’s not going to let me go until she’s done.”

“Okay,” he said, shaking his head as the whiskey hit him. “Let’s figure out what she wants, and go do it.”

“I wish it were that simple. She’s not good at communicating,” I said. “Or maybe I’m not good at understanding the message. So far, these dreams have been about her kidnapping and imprisonment. Why aren’t they about that big thing that made her famous? Why aren’t they about what happened in Troy?”

“Good question,” Mike said.

“Or…maybe they are,” I realized, and my stomach sank to my feet. “Maybe this is just the preamble, and then I get to watch another twenty years of politics and war. Which…well, I’d love to know what really happened in the Trojan War, but I don’t have the time to watch it now, and I definitely don’t have the time to tell the rest of the world—

“Oh God,” I groaned. “What if she wants me to be her public image consultant? What if she’s tired of being portrayed as this meek blonde waif in a dress, and she wants me to fix it?

“I don’t know how to do that, Mike!” I grabbed his arm, and he signaled the bartender for another couple of drinks. “How do I make all of Western culture change their image of Helen of Troy to Helen of Sparta? I’m not that good!”

“Easy,” Mike said, as he pushed the whiskey into my hands. “You’re just guessing. Let’s talk this through. What has Helen actually said she wants you to do?”

I thought back to what Helen had told me at the Kos Asklepion. “I am tired of this world,” I quoted. “The beast waits below the island. Set us both free.”

“Good,” he said. “So we’ve got an island, a beast, and a command. She wants you to set them free.”

“Speedy thinks she’s helping me,” I said. “That she’s popped into the future and seen where I’m headed, and wants to prep me on what’s coming.”

“Speedy’s almost always right,” Mike said. “So, she’s helping you, but she also wants you to help her? Why would Helen ask you to set her free? She’s a powerful ghost—she’s not limited by physical constraints.”

I huffed out a long breath. “What do we know about the Afterlife?” I asked. “Beside the part where you get to build your own dream house.”

“Damned little. It’s more limbo than reality. You wait there while you decide whether you want to move on from this life to the next.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So why does she think she’s trapped? She could pick up and move on to the next life whenever she wants.”

Mike mulled this over. “I’m a Buddhist,” he finally said.

“You’ve mentioned.”

“Buddhism is big on the problem of getting trapped within cycles of your own making. Much of what holds us back are barriers we impose upon ourselves. These are mental barriers, not physical—they’d apply to dead humans as much as living ones.”

“I’m with you,” I said.

“Now, who’s most likely to stay behind as a ghost?”

“Soldiers, politicians, and creative types who want to continue their experiments or projects or whatever,” I said. It was a good rule of thumb that if someone felt invested in the welfare of the world of the living, they’d stick around. I didn’t like battlefields; way too many dead people still fighting over causes long since resolved. “Fame alone doesn’t tie a ghost down—if it did, we’d be swimming in James Deans and Marilyn Monroes.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Ghosts stick around because they feel they have to. Maybe some of them don’t accept that they already have the ability to move on to the next life…maybe some of them don’t think they have the right to move on.”

“That would explain the battlefields,” I sighed.

Mike nodded. “If we accept that ghosts think they still have obligations,” he said. “That feeling of responsibility means they feel compelled to follow patterns they already have the power to break.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “So, if we follow this logic, what? We’ve decided Helen’s sticking around because she feels responsible for something…maybe…?”

“Yes, but how does an island fit into this?” he asked. “And which island? There are hundreds of them around Greece.”

“Not to mention the beast,” I said. “Which is a very vague term, and could mean anything from Theseus’ ghost to a llama with a bad combover.”

We slumped over our drinks.

“We need more data,” I said, as I poked at a salt shaker.

“Yeah, we do,” he said. “We’re just grasping at straws here.”

“Think we could just call Helen and ask?”

He didn’t reply.

“Thought not,” I said. I threw a bunch of money on the bar, and went back upstairs to bed.