I stayed down in my kingdom for a long time after that. The carpenter ghosts had finished the addition to Villa Pluto. The Furies—Tisi, Meg, and Alec—moved in. These three ladies have huge black wings and snakes instead of hair. Each night they flew up to earth to punish the wicked. So they always came home with plenty of juicy stories. After the ghost workers left, Cerbie started barking at the Furies. Still, it was a fine time to be in the Underworld.

One evening I was in my den, sitting in my La-Z-God recliner. I had it flat out in “total recline.” I was reading Dog Training Made Easy and had just gotten to the chapter on barking when there was a knock at the den door.

Cerbie leaped up. “Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof!”

“Cerbie, stop it!” He didn’t, so I grabbed him by the collar. “Come in!” I called.

Hypnos, my first lieutenant, opened the door. When he saw Cerbie snarling with all three heads and straining to get at him, he closed it part way.

“Sorry to bother you, Lord Hades,” Hypnos said through the crack.

“What is it, Hypnos?”

“We have a situation,” Hypnos said. “Too many new ghosts are arriving. Motel Styx is bursting at the seams.”

Motel Styx is where newly arrived ghosts go when they first get to the Underworld.

“But how can that be?” I asked Hypnos. “There aren’t that many Old Ones left on earth. So how could there be so many ghosts?”

“I’m not good at figuring things out, Lord Hades,” said Hypnos, putting a hand to his mouth to cover a yawn. He’s the official god of sleep, and he’s always wanting to doze off. “I’m only telling you what the desk clerk at Motel Styx told me.”

“Right,” I said. “Come on, Cerbie. I guess we’d better go and take a look.”

It was a good thing we did. It wasn’t the ghosts of Old Ones who were clogging the system. It was guy ghosts. Hundreds of them! Lost ghosts were roaming the Motel Styx hallways. They were moaning and groaning and complaining. The vending machines were completely emptied out. The bathroom had a line a dekamile long outside it. What was going on?

I jumped into my chariot and headed for the River Styx. When I got there, Charon, the river-taxi driver, had just brought over another boatload of ghosts.

“Charon!” I called. “What’s happening? Where are all these ghosts coming from?”

“Earth, Lord Hades,” said Charon. “Earth.”

Charon is not exactly a merry-sunshine kind of immortal. I’ve never heard him laugh. But that day he was almost smiling. And I knew why. Ghosts have to pay one gold coin to be ferried over to my kingdom. The old miser was making a fortune. I wasn’t going to get any more information out of him.

“Looks like I have to go up to earth, Cerbie,” I told my pooch. “You want to come?”

Cerbie wagged his stump of a tail. Maybe he had a little barking problem, but what a pal.

I hurried back to Villa Pluto to stock up on fodder for my steeds, Cheese Yummies for Cerberus, and enough Necta-Colas and bags of Ambro-Chips to last me the nine-day trip. Then I jumped into my chariot and started up the Underworld Highway, a steep, rocky road that is the only way into or out of the Underworld.

Nine days later, my chariot rolled onto the edge of a forest on earth.

I reined in my steeds, and my eyes widened in disbelief. The place was crawling with guys. Prometheus’s guys. They were sitting in the mouths of caves or walking on dirt paths between caves. With my own godly ears I’d heard Prometheus promise Zeus wouldn’t make too many guys. But he had. Way too many! Anyway, this explained the population explosion down in my kingdom.

The guys had grown since I’d seen them last. They didn’t look all that much like Prometheus anymore. They had shaggy hair. And bushy beards. They were wrapped up in layers of what looked like tree bark and leaves. They wore bark on their feet, too. And they gave off a very strong odor.

A big bunch of smelly guys hurried over to my chariot. They surrounded it, muttering things like “Hubcaps good,” and kicking my wheels. They fired questions at me.

“What best time for zero to LX?” asked one guy.

“How chariot handle curves?” asked another guy.

“Can go off road?” asked a third.

Cerbie went into a low-level triple growl.

Suddenly I heard someone call, “Hey-hey, Hades!”

Only one god greets me like that—my wild-and-crazy brother, Poseidon, Ruler of the Seas.

“Hey, Po!” I cried, happy to see him. He drew his earth chariot up alongside mine. (His main mode of transportation at the time was sea chariot, drawn by a team of giant seahorses. But on land, he drove a sporty little two-seater.)

Now the guys ran to him. They started oohing and aahing over his chariot.

“Hey, party guys!” Po greeted them. Clearly, the guys were no strangers to Po. “What’s happening?”

“Big Flatten-Guy-Running-With-Rock game today,” said one of the guys.

“Gonna be great,” said another guy. “Saber Tooths against Woolly Mammoths.”

“Go Mammoths!” yelled a few of the guys.

“All right!” said Po, sounding very much like a guy himself. “And what’s the scene after the game?”

“Big tailgate party,” one of the guys told him. “In parking lot.”

“We got keg!” said another guy.

“And plenty snacks!” said another.

“Right!” said still another. “Seeds! Nuts! Berries!”

Seeds? Nuts? Berries? Squirrel food! Even the guys didn’t seem that excited.

Po turned to me and rolled his eyes. “You know Zeus was majorly ticked off when he discovered that Prometheus had made so many guys.”

“I’ll bet,” I said.

“So he made a decree,” said Po. “No hunting. All the guys have to eat are what they can pick off bushes.” He shrugged. “Prometheus keeps begging Zeus to let them have a little meat now and then, but you know how stubborn our little bro can be.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. I felt sorry for the guys.

“Hey!” called a guy. “We go back my cave until game start. We make paintings of favorite players on wall of cave.”

“And we look at them!” yelled another.

“Yay!” called yet another. “Pre-game show!”

“Go, Mammoths!” yelled one of the guys. And they all started to run off.

At that moment, a guy ran by shouting, “Hey, guys? Run to foot of Mount Olympus. Fast! Our friend Prometheus says so!”

“What going happen?” called another guy.

“Something!” the messenger guy shouted. “Something big!”