“Despite the common misconception, the river Styx is not the river the newly dead must cross to reach the underworld. As any mythological scholar worth his salt will tell you (or any one of the gods themselves, were they in the mood to give a straight answer), one of the Styx’s qualities is that any mortal bathed in its waters becomes invulnerable—provided they survive (the lawyers seem to think this important; see Chapter 14: Achilles and the Importance of Good Footwear). You simply can’t leave a river like that just lying around, readily accessible to any mortal who happens to find one of the numerous passages to underworld borders. The Styx is therefore located deeper in Hades beyond the river that does border the edge of the underworld: the Acheron.
“The Acheron’s ferry crossing is but one checkpoint designed to allow only the deceased to pass, thus keeping crowds of invulnerability-seeking mortals out from underfoot. This is why there is a ferry and not a bridge; it keeps away the riffraff.
“This is not to say a bridge was not tried. According to an interview with Charon, ferryman of the Acheron, it failed. Merely touching the Acheron causes extreme pain, a phenomenon that doomed any efforts of the construction crew. The best protective gear did little, and the worker turnover rate was ruinous. According to Charon, Hades did consider the possibility of using some of the mortal souls damned to Tartarus as a source of slave labor, under the theory that the damned workers would have no choice but to endure the pain. The lack of a bridge today shows us that Hades finally eschewed this option. This is likely for the best. One need only look so far as horror cinema (House of the Damned, Highway of the Damned, and Wetlands Preservation Culvert of the Damned, among others) to know that projects built by the damned seldom turn out well.”
—A Mortal’s Guidebook to the Olympians’ Return
TRACY SLUNG THE HALF-FILLED backpack over her other shoulder and knocked on the rickety door of the wooden dwelling. A real estate agent with generous optimism would call it quaint. To anyone with a greater duty to the truth, it was a shack, and a cramped shack at that. The wood siding, perhaps once stained in times long ago, was faded and warped from exposure to the river it overlooked. Its walls had begun to lean under the weight of the roof, which seemed to have yet failed to collapse due only to the sheer will of the cosmos. The aforementioned real estate agent (whom for no reason we shall call Warren) would cheerfully point out that the walls—clearly still parallel to each other despite leaning—ably supported what would soon be a marvelous built-in skylight. Warren would likely make some excuse to dash from the room before anyone could point out that a skylight would afford only a dull view of the ceiling of the subterranean cavern in which the whole affair hunched.
Tracy gazed up at that same cavern ceiling as she waited outside the door. While not what she would call pretty, the eerie, rust-colored light that bathed the cavern at least provided a measure of atmosphere. It was no starry sky, but it did have a certain character.
Warren would have liked Tracy, if he existed. (He does not, however, and as such is possessed of more immediate problems.)
The door opened after Tracy’s second knock, and she blinked at the face that presented itself.
“Oh, hello,” she said with a smile. “Charon, I presume?”
It wasn’t an unfair presumption. Who else would one find squatting in a shack at the ferry mooring for the river Acheron but the mythical Charon, ferryman to the land of the dead? He was the logical thing to expect to find, right ahead of a small Starbucks. And yet somehow she had always pictured him to be an old man. While the faded black robes he wore fit the part, within them stood a man who looked hardly older than she, with rich brown eyes and a full head of hair. On the other hand, the scowl that bitterly gripped his face after she asked her question fit her expectations perfectly.
“Nope,” he said. “Trust me; I’m very sorry to say Charon’s not here right now.”
“Okay. Can you help me, then? I’m—”
The man held up a hand. “Are you dead?”
“Er, no. I was told that wouldn’t be a problem.”
“Told by who? Actually, you know what? I probably don’t want to know.” The man tested her with a poke in the shoulder. The result appeared to pleasantly surprise him. “Hey, look at that. You’re not dead. Are you lost?”
“No, I’m—”
“Oh, crap, you’re not with Amway, are you?” He leveled a suspicious gaze at her slung backpack.
“No?”
“Hot damn, that’s a relief. The deceased ones are bad enough; even when they’re dead they don’t stop selling.” He crossed his arms and leaned against the door frame, quickly standing straight up again when the shack creaked in protest. “So what’re you doing down here, anyway?”
“Trying to get across to Hades. This is the ferry, isn’t it?”
“This is a rickety old crap-shack,” he said. “That’s the ferry. But I have the singular joy of running it for the moment, yes.”
“Well, then—”
“But you can’t go. Sorry. Only the dead, that’s the rule.”
Tracy peered over the man’s shoulder into the dim quarters beyond. “Is Charon in there? Could I speak to him, maybe?”
“Lady, if he was, do you think I’d be here?” He stepped aside, allowing a better view of the shack’s interior. There was little more than a small bed, a wooden desk, and a few odds, ends, and pieces of laundry lying about.
The talk-to-the-manager trick wasn’t going to work, it seemed.
“Okay, but you can’t just outright refuse, can you? I’ve read mythology and I know for a fact that live mortals have crossed the river before.”
“Mythology, and you know for a fact?” He grinned. “Want to think about that one a sec?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean, but I was a devout atheist until a little over a year ago. Still a little bitter. And maybe there’re new rules, you ever think of that?”
“Look . . . What’s your name?”
“Marcus.”
“Look, Marcus, the only reason I’m here at all is because some god’s oracle gave me a quest. If the rules weren’t bendable, I wouldn’t have gotten the quest, so—”
“Yeah, because the ‘gods’ and their pals aren’t devious pricks at all.” (He did the air quotes and everything.)
She straightened her spine, summoning up every ounce of authority she could. “The point is, I need to get over there, and I’m not leaving this spot until you take me.”
Marcus smirked. “I only run the ferry. I don’t do the ‘taking’. That’s Death’s job. How’d Charon put it? ‘He hangs around here sometimes, and he gets uptight when someone takes the living across before he gets to ’em. Says it messes up the order, and order’s his thing, you see. He’s a control freak. If you ask me, he has a bit of a stick up his ass, but he does outrank me.’”
“I meant take me across the river. I’ve no intention of dying in the process.”
“Important distinction, that.” He picked a bit of lint off of his robe. “Fine, maybe I can bend the rules if you want it badly enough to do something for me in return.”
Tracy bit down on demanding why everyone was suggesting sexual currency lately. “And what sort of something are we talking about?” came out after a moment of temper wrangling. Judging by the look on Marcus’s face, she contained her disgust poorly.
“What? Oh, no, nothing like that. Geez, I don’t even know you.”
She released her frustration with a relieved sigh. “Thank you. You wouldn’t believe the week I’ve had.”
“I’m believing a lot more things than I used to, lately.”
Well, that fit, she supposed. “So what do you want me to do, then? I don’t really have a lot of time.” Tracy braced herself for the onslaught of impending zaniness.
“I need you to go back up to the surface and get me a whole bunch of batteries. All sizes, from D on down to the tiny ones.”
“Batteries?” Tracy asked. Apollo’s oracle mentioned nothing of batteries. “What’s the catch? Are they some special batteries I have to talk to a sphinx to get or something?”
“No catch. I just need batteries. I spaced it when I came down here. Now I’ve got a shack full of electronics I can’t use. Things are all rigged up to use batteries, but that doesn’t do me much good without a single one around.”
“Er, okay. How many?”
“Fifty of each ought to do, just to be safe.”
“You’ll pay for them, of course?”
Marcus shrugged. “You look like you can afford it. If you want a rule-bending ride across, it’s on you.”
“My employment situation’s a little up in the air at the moment.”
“Want a steady job as a Hades ferryman?”
“Thanks, no.”
“Well, then. Batteries. Use a credit card or something. Oh, and none of those cheapo store brands either.”
It occurred to Tracy that she could stand there arguing details about one of the simplest things anyone had asked her to do in a while, or . . .
“Fine, I’ll pay for the damn batteries.”
Marcus laughed. “Damn batteries. That’s a good one.”
“Your sense of humor really takes a hit down here, doesn’t it?”
He shrugged and turned to go back inside. “Good luck. Oh, and I wouldn’t recommend trying to swim across instead, if you’re considering that. It’s, ah, bad. A hundredfold worse than labor pains.”
“How would you know?”
“Just . . . don’t ask.”
Tracy bought the batteries with surprisingly little trouble from a twenty-four-hour Battery Bunker just a few blocks from the manhole in downtown Reno that concealed this particular entrance to Hades. The Battery Bunker wasn’t crowded. She paid with a credit card. There was even a volume discount. Stepping on a blob of sidewalk gum was about the worst thing that happened to her. The night was looking up, and soon afterward she made her way back down the tunnel, bribe in hand, to knock on the door of the little shack again.
There was no answer.
She knocked once more, muttering a few profanities that she belatedly hoped might serve as magic words. Again, there was no answer.
The door wouldn’t budge when she tried it, and a few glances around the shore gave no sign of Marcus anywhere. Nor, she realized, did they give any sign of the ferry she’d seen before. She muttered a little more and walked the length of the dock to fruitlessly peer out through the mist that drifted above the Acheron’s obsidian current. All she could make out of the far shore were some indistinct shapes. With little else to do but hope the ferry would be back soon, she sat down on the edge of the dock to wait.
A hand-painted sign on the edge of the dock caught her eye, but her brief hope that it might provide some clue to when the ferry would be back was dashed once she read the age-worn lettering, written in at least twenty different languages:
No swimming: Lifeguard never on duty. Do not taunt the river.
Save for a few nervous glances behind her at the shore and several half-imagined sounds, Tracy’s wait was brief and unremarkable. Each time she looked behind her, she expected to be staring straight into the dead eyes of a corpse or spirit or what-have-you, but not once did she catch sight of anything. Were her mind not valiantly occupied defending itself against the heebie-jeebies, Tracy might have taken a moment to ponder something that the more annoyingly detail-oriented reader may have already wondered (or voiced, or made some snarky comment about on the Internet): It was a big world. People were dying every second. Where were all the spirits who ought to be piling up on shore by the minute?
She did not wonder this, of course—not yet, anyway—and so such readers should simply rest assured that there was a good reason for it. A very good reason. A most excellent and clever reason. In fact, many clues have already been left in previous chapters regarding this matter, and only the most intelligent and diligent of you shall be able to puzzle it out.
. . .And now that those people have all gone off on a literary snipe hunt, we can ditch them and move on.
After a time not nearly short enough for Tracy’s liking, the outline of a ferry and lone boatman appeared out of the mist. She stood, half expecting that it would be piloted by someone other than Marcus just so that she’d have to negotiate all over again, but the fear was baseless. Soon the ferry was tied up, and Marcus stood with her on the dock. He gave no explanation for his absence, and Tracy wasn’t all that interested in asking about it.
“Got your batteries.” She opened up the bag to show him.
“Looks good. Ooh, lithium. You splurged.”
“So we have a deal, then?”
“That we do. Hand them over and I’ll take you across, no questions asked.”
He reached for the bag. Tracy pulled it away. “Just so we’re clear: You’re agreeing to take me across and bring me back, correct?”
His anticipatory grin faded in an instant. He glanced between her and the batteries like a child told to finish his vegetables before dessert.
“Fine,” he grumbled finally. “Deal. Both ways.” He took the bag and carried it to the shack. “Just . . . get in the boat. And congratulations, you’re officially smarter than me now.”
Tracy picked up her backpack and stepped gingerly into the little ferry as instructed. Marcus soon joined her, still scowling, and untied the mooring line.
“I didn’t think of that part when I first came here,” he explained after they’d pulled away from the dock. “Came right on down like I knew everything.”
Tracy nodded, barely listening, instead trying to concentrate on the task that awaited her on the other side of the river. Her head was beginning to buzz a bit too. Marcus either didn’t notice her attempts to tune him out, or he didn’t care.
“Found a path through a hole in my basement,” he continued. “I lived in that house for two years and hadn’t seen it, but then Miranda’s cat—Miranda, she’s my girlfriend—ran down into the basement when I tried to give the thing its ear medicine and—”
“I’m sorry, do you mind not talking? I’m just a little preoccupied and not really up to it. Plus I think this water’s giving me a headache or something. No offense.”
Marcus rolled his eyes. “I do mind, actually. I’m going bonkers from not having anyone to talk to down here, so you’re gonna listen to my story. The batteries bought you passage, not silence.”
She drummed her fingers on the rim of the ferry. “You ferry the dead, right? You don’t talk to them?”
“Ugh, no. I gave that up after the first week. Too many questions, always the same. ‘Where am I?’ ‘Am I dead?’ ‘What happened?’ and my personal favorite, ‘No, really: Am I dead?’ It got old fast, and I realized that if I don’t say much, that tends to shut most of them up. Besides, I think there’s some sort of orientation seminar once they get to the other side.”
“Ah.”
“So anyway, there I am, chasing my girlfriend’s cat down a dark tunnel, thinking how much that sounds like the start of a dirty joke, when I come out on the shores of the Acheron and spot this old guy taking money from people who, from my perspective, have somehow come down through my basement! I didn’t know about the multiple- overworld-entrances-to-Hades thing; back then I didn’t even know about the Hades thing. Thought it was all mythological crap and Charon was just some guy pulling a confidence scheme from people who thought they were dead.”
Tracy continued to nod, still not paying much attention. Her headache remained steady yet manageable as long as she didn’t lean too close to the water. They were somewhere in the middle of the wide river now, drifting through the mist as vague shadows moved beneath the water. She double-checked the contents of her pack as Marcus continued.
“So long story short, I get him to agree to take me across—he said the cat rode across already—get off on the other side, go through this tunnel and run smack into the dog.”
That perked her ears up. “Cerberus?”
“Yup. Not that I knew the name at the time. I didn’t know much about this stuff back then.” He leaned forward to speak confidentially. “And I hate dogs. Absolutely hate ’em. Stupid barking stink factories. He chased me back out of the tunnel to the riverbank where Charon waited a few yards offshore, and that’s when he springs on me the whole bit that, oh yeah, he never actually agreed to ferry me back.”
Tracy stifled a self-satisfied grin, just to be polite.
“So there I am, Cerberus growling at my heels with all three heads, trapped there until I starve to death unless I get a ride back. Then Charon goes off on some rant about how he never gets a break, stuck at the ass-end of the underworld for all eternity with all that coin he gets for tolls and no chance to spend it. He tells me he’ll only take me back if I swear to return in six months and spend half of every year until I die taking his place so that he can go up and have a vacation. So bam, here I am, and that’s why the ‘gods’ and all of their little friends are manipulative pricks!”
“That’s rough. Did you ever get the cat back?”
“Yeah, got the cat back. Tried to tell Miranda the whole story, but of course she just laughed at me. That was before the Olympians all came back, so on the plus side, I had a nice long apology message on my voice mail when I got back after my first shift. I think she’s only with me now for the status, but I decided I can live with that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, I know; you didn’t ask. Tough.”
The ferry neared the other side. A narrow stretch of rocky beach sat before a dark cave in the face of a cliff that loomed high and sheer. There was no sign of Cerberus, though from what she understood, the dog was farther up the tunnel.
“And you know what else?” Marcus snapped. “I don’t even get to keep any of the toll funds! After Hades takes his cut, Charon gets everything that’s left! I’m doing this for free! Do you know how hard it is to get a job for only six months out of the year that doesn’t involve shipping out on a fishing trawler?”
The ferry slid ashore with an unceremonious scrape, and Tracy took the earliest opportunity to step out. Her head cleared almost immediately. “So you’ll be here when I get back?”
“Depends on when you get back, but I make the trip pretty regularly. Shouldn’t have to wait more than half an hour, I guess. I’d ask what you’re doing, but I’ve got a schedule, and frankly I don’t much care.”
“Thanks for the ride, then.” She triple-checked the contents of her pack, slung it back on her shoulder, and turned to go. “Wish me luck.”
“Nah. Quite frankly I’m not above a little schadenfreude{2}, so I’m kinda hoping you fail. No offense.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” He pushed the ferry away from shore. “Don’t let the dog bite ya in the ass on the way out. Or do. What do I care?”
When he at last disappeared into the haze, she screwed up her courage and turned toward the cave entrance. If Apollo was to be believed, the cave was actually a tunnel that stretched the final distance to the gates of Hades’s domain. There would stand Cerberus, the object of her assignment. (Apollo and the oracle had called it a quest, but she’d mentally swapped out the term in an effort to create an illusion of normalcy.)
Even though she knew what she had to do and she believed it was necessary, she still didn’t want to do it. Hercules, whom she now supposed actually existed at one point, had once dragged Cerberus from his post into the world above―and from what she recalled of the tale, the three-headed dog wasn’t all that pleased about it. While the task on her plate was a different one, it wasn’t without its own challenges, not the least of which was that Cerberus would probably like it even less.
The beam of a lone flashlight guided her way through the darkness. (Historians and record keepers may be interested to know that she was the first person to think of bringing such a device through that particular tunnel, and that includes Marcus. Feel free to lower your estimations of him down just a tick. There you go.) The tunnel floor was rough and completely unworn by eons of spiritual passage, and while vines of purplish ivy covered the walls in intermittent patches, she saw no sign of animals or insects.
“What did you expect in the land of the dead, Tracy?” she muttered to fill the unsettling quiet. Each step she took was soundless. Not even her own breathing registered to her ears, and the utter lack of distraction allowed her to concentrate on worrying that she was getting involved in things far too deeply. Not exactly a helpful train of thought for a person on an assignme-quest, but there was little she could do about it besides increase her pace and get to Cerberus before her confidence had eroded completely.
Her flashlight beam illuminated a bit of graffiti carved into the tunnel wall: Where am I? Am I dead? Who will feed my fish? She quickened her pace and then noticed another note in a different hand: What would Samuel L. Jackson do? She passed it by. Orpheus was here, bitches! She paused at that one just long enough to feel unspoken skepticism about its authenticity and then left it, too, behind before spotting: No, really: Am I dead?
Marcus had a point, Tracy decided. She didn’t bother reading more.
There was a light ahead, orange, promising, and weird, like a sunset at the start of the day. Tracy crouched down in the tunnel and switched off the flashlight, putting it back into her pack. She withdrew from the pack a few other items, counting some, assembling others. When she had everything sorted out, Tracy stood to luxuriate in one final bit of hesitation that she couldn’t afford.
“Who am I?” she asked to psych herself up. “Who am I? I’m Zeus’s motherfuckin’ daughter, that’s who!”
It actually helped. There was something to be said for a good, inspiring game of What Would Samuel L. Jackson Do? after all.
Long, long ago in the before-time, a young, lovestruck, and still-living mortal named Orpheus made his way into Hades, coming face-to-face (to-face-to-face) with Cerberus. Orpheus played a tune on his lyre so beautiful that it pacified the dog into letting him pass freely. Another mortal by the name of Aeneas made his way past with the help of some drugged cakes that he fed to the beast. According to Apollo, neither option was open to Tracy: Soon after the cake-drugging, Hades had fortified Cerberus’s stomach lining against such weaknesses and assigned a dead musician to come by each day at noon to play for the creature until he grew accustomed to music. Indeed, as she crept slowly toward the beast that stood ahead, Tracy noticed that the middle head wore a set of headphones connected to an MP3 player on its collar and looked no less alert for it.
The legendary guardian blocked the path to the golden gates of Hades. Cerberus was the size of a grizzly, but shaped like a horrid wolf. Claws on enormous paws scraped the rocks as he watched her, midnight fur bristling along his massive bulk, ears up, tail whipping the air behind him. Again, Tracy hesitated. She forced herself closer. One of the heads lowered, red eyes flaring as it sensed the thread of life still within her.
Apollo’s words came back to her. “For all his fearsomeness, Cerberus will not harm you unless you attack him or try to pass alive into the land of the dead. Move slowly, take no offensive action, and you’ll be just fine.” Comforting words, were it not for Marcus’s, “The ‘gods’ and all of their little friends are manipulative pricks!” springing to mind moments later.
Tracy did as Apollo had advised, edging closer. All three heads watched her approach. The right one growled at her, the left one growled at her, and the middle one, bopping slightly to whatever tune played on the headphones, nevertheless also growled at her. She got as close as she dared, easily within striking distance of the creature’s paws, and held out the three jumbo-sized doggie biscuits she’d brought. The center head perked up at that, alert to this new development.
The sudden motion spooked her and she tossed all three biscuits at Cerberus’s feet in a startled offering. In a flash the creature jumped back a step. Two heads lowered instantly, their teeth bared, as the middle head rose high to bark out a terrifying thunderclap. Tracy froze where she stood, horrified that it had misconstrued her startled toss as an attack.
Time slowed to a trickle. The standoff continued. She had no idea how long she was standing there before she thought to hunch down just a bit, lower her head and her eyes, and make herself smaller and less threatening. (Because if there’s one thing a massive three-headed dog is afraid of, it’s a thin, five-foot-eight television producer with a backpack.) A trickle of sweat ran down the back of her neck. Slowly, the growling abated. Tracy suddenly realized she could have gotten a fortune for catching this all on camera.
Then the left head again noticed the biscuits on the ground. After a few tentative sniffs, it snapped one up, crunching. This caught the attention of the right head, which soon moved down to snap up a biscuit of its own just as the left, still chewing on the first, went back for seconds. The two got into a growling match, snapping competitively over the remaining biscuits for a moment until the center head let out another paralyzing bark. Tracy stumbled back in reflex. All three heads paused to regard her for a moment with what might very well have been amusement before they focused back on the biscuits. The center head snapped up both and then deftly tossed one to the right head. As his three heads munched happily on the Doctor Barkwell’s Extra-Chewie Biscuit Jerky Yum-Yums™, Cerberus took a few steps back until his body fully blocked the gateway while he enjoyed his treats.
That was fine with Tracy. She didn’t need to get past Cerberus at all; she just needed the creature pacified for a while. Yet only a fool would think that dog biscuits would buy her longer than a few seconds. What they did do was distract the creature while she grabbed from her back the tranquilizer rifle she’d assembled in the tunnel moments ago, aimed, and fired enough Corfentanyl into the base of the creature’s necks to take down an elephant. The shot was on target, penetrated the hide, and—as it was nowhere near any pesky hardened stomach lining—dropped the creature near immediately.
It wasn’t really a solution that Jason would have approved of, she mused, but this was her assign-mission-o-quest. She wondered if it might ever make its way into future tales, her own little story of confronting Cerberus, listed among those of Aeneas, Hercules, and Orpheus. Tracy Wallace, the daughter of Zeus, who sailed to Hades on a quest of the gods: to groom Cerberus like a French poodle.
She fished into her bag for shears and ribbons and wondered if she might not want to be known for this particular act at all.