by Mark Cain
“Only about twenty or thirty feet, I imagine. Erebus was here when I bought this bit of real estate from Hades and rebranded it as Hell. The mountain exists in its own pocket universe, and gravity is flipped on its head within that universe. As BOOH gets closer to the mass of the mountain, he reaches a point where the gravity of Erebus and the gravity of the Underworld cancel each other out.”
I nodded. “That’s why he could only hover when he was near the mountain.”
“Correct. But there is actually no physical barrier between Hell and Erebus. Get to the base of the mountain, and you should have no problem climbing it. I know you already noticed the service ladder on the ceiling of level two. BOOH can fly you to it, then you and Orson can use it like a jungle gym to climb to the base of the mountain.”
Satan waved at the black void behind him, and a screen appeared. He and I shared an interest in old movies. He projected a scene from ‘Royal Wedding,’ where Fred Astaire was dancing on the floor, then walls, then ceiling of his stateroom. “It’ll work like that, Minion. Once you get close enough to Erebus, up will be down and down will be up. Shouldn’t be more than a few seconds of disorientation, then you will be looking up at the mountain instead of down.”
And facing one bitch of a climb.
“And facing one bitch of a climb,” Satan agreed, voicing my inner thoughts. “I suspect you will find the problem with the fuel line near the summit.”
“Why sir?”
Satan didn’t answer immediately. When he spoke again, it was as if he’d changed topics. “Beelzebub told me about you and Pinkerton trying to narrow down the field of suspects. What you didn’t know was that there isn’t a human, demon or even devil who can keep something from me if I want to know it. Well, except for Nightingale,” he added sourly, “and she doesn’t have the horsepower to screw with the HVAC system.”
I frowned. “Sure wish I’d known this before. It would have saved a lot of time.”
“But what fun would that have been?” Satan said, grinning wolfishly. “Anyway, there is one class of Hell’s inhabitants whose minds I cannot read.”
“Really? Who.”
“All those mythological beings I’ve let into the Underworld. They’re all a bit of a cipher to me.” He shrugged. “I should boot them out of Hell, I suppose, but what can I do? I’m a collector of creatures from dead religions. They fascinate me. Usually, I don’t have a problem with them. Sisyhpus, Prometheus and Charon, for example, are model employees.”
“But what does this have to do with Erebus?” I asked.
“Ymir,” was his simple response.
“Ymir.” I ran my fingers through my hair in thought. Satan frowned at my full mane but said nothing. “He … he’s from Norse mythology, right?”
“Yes, part of its creation story, a frost giant. He maintains the cooling plant at the summit of Erebus, though there’s really not much for him to do, since the mountain itself does most of what’s needed. Still, he’s the only creature on the mountain at all, and since I can’t read his mind, he’s probably the one who’s at the bottom of this whole mess.” Satan frowned again. “Though I wouldn’t have thought him capable of it.”
“Not enough horsepower?” I asked, using Satan’s own metaphor.
“Ymir’s plenty strong. He’s just a mental midget. Digger is Albert Einstein by comparison.”
“But … but he’s still the likely candidate here?” My mind filled with an image of a monstrous and vicious sentinel made entirely of ice “A frost giant? And Orson and I are going to go up against him on our own? With what?”
Grinning, Satan held out empty hands to me. I don’t know whose hands they were, but they were empty. “Got me. Duct tape?”
“Great,” I said, scooting back in my chair. It was time to go.
“Good luck, Minion,” the Devil said mildly. “You’re going to need it. And watch your back, because I won’t.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Now get out of my office.”
“Getting,” I said, and hurried out of Satan’s lair.
Chapter 25
Opening the door to the trailer, I heard the mellifluous voice of my assistant.
“Rope.”
“Check,” the voice of Bik said in a high-pitched squeek.
“Pitons.”
The fire giant, who looked much improved since the last time I saw him, was buzzing over a mini-mountain of gear piled in the center of the floor. Orson was sprawled on the floor beside the hillock. “Uh, what’s a piton?” Bik asked.
Orson had wasted no time getting us provisioned, probably asking Dora to give him everything she had that could remotely be used for mountaineering, including the book I saw in his hand, The Idiot’s Guide to Mountain Climbing.
I wish I’d thought up that little franchise. I could have made a bazillion dollars.
Just stick “The Idiot’s Guide” in front of anything - The Idiot’s Guide to the Marimba, The Idiot’s Guide to Bestiality, The Idiot’s Guide to Insider Trading - and you had a best seller. Orson was perusing a page near the back of the book, where he must have found a mountaineer’s checklist, and he was confirming that we had what we needed.
Orson checked the index, turned to the appropriate page and read, “Let’s see. Says here a piton is a stake that a climber drives into a rock or crack in the side of a mountain. I guess you can grab it with your hand or use it to support a rope.”
Boy, if we need to do that, we’re in trouble.
“I like my steaks medium rare,” I said in as light-hearted a tone as possible.
“Hi, Steve. I got the gear.”
“So I see. Bik, what are you doing here? I thought I told you to stay with your grandpa.”
Bik flew to within a few inches of my face and hovered like a hummingbird. A big hummingbird. He’d grown again, and was now larger than a Sharpie. He had a frown on his face, but all he said was, “I’m fine. Grandpa fed me and told me to get my butt back up here, in case you needed my help.”
“Well, you didn’t waste any time. You must have flown like a bat out of Hell to get here ahead of me.”
“Yeah,” he said, turning from me quickly to get back to helping Orson with the inventory.
I looked at my assistant. “Do you have any idea how to use this stuff?”
“Not much,” he admitted. “I’m a speed reader, though, so as soon as I finish checking the inventory, I’ll read the book.”
“I took a speed reading course in college. Evelyn something or other. After the training, I used my new skill to get through my biology textbook in one night.”
“Let me guess. That would have been the night before the final.”
“Right you are,” I said, plopping down on the floor and sifting through the gear.
“And … ?”
“And somehow I passed my final.”
“And … ?” he asked again. “What do you remember about biology?”
“Let’s see.” I thought for a minute. “Nucleotide … mitochondria … scatology.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah, and just the words. I don’t know what they mean - except scatology of course.”
Orson grinned. “I bet you know a bit about eschatology too.”
“Yep, they both figure pretty prominently in my day-to-day afterlife.”
“Mine too, but in view of your rather pathetic speed reading skills,” he said, ripping the inventory out of the back of the guide. “I’ll use the book to take a crash course on mountain climbing while you and Bik finish the inventory.”
“Check,” I said.
“No,” Bik said, buzzing past me. “You call out the item, and I say check.”
“Well, I didn’t hear you say check about the pitons.”
Bik hovered in space, his hands on his hips. “That’s because I didn’t know what they were. I do now.”
“And?”
“Oh, right. Check.”
Orson sat down in my desk chair and cracked open
the front of the book. “I still don’t know how we’re going to climb upside down.”
“It won’t be upside down after the first few yards.” I explained to Orson about the reverse gravity of Erebus. “So, after we do our hand to hand thing for about twenty feet, gravity should flip, the ceiling will become the floor, and we’ll be fine.”
“Sounds swell. I haven’t done a jungle gym since I was twelve,” he said, “and I’ve only gained, what, three hundred pounds since then.”
“Sorry. Can’t be helped.”
Grumbling, Orson started to read.
Meanwhile, I continued with the inventory. “Hammer.”
“Check, check - two of them - though they don’t look very much like that one in your tool belt.”
“The ones you got from Dora are specialized, I assume. Uh, carabiners.”
“What?”
“Clippy things that you can snap over ropes or tie ropes to.”
“Man, you guys are going to get yourselves killed,” the fire giant said.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. Besides, we’ve already gotten ourselves killed. Everything else has been pretty anticlimactic since then. I imagine we’ll do okay,” I concluded, not feeling particularly confident about it, but trying to put on a brave face.
Bik dropped to the linoleum and extinguished his flame. He charred a little bit of the tile, since he performed these tasks in the wrong order. He looked troubled. “Well, maybe you’ll be all right, but I think I should go along, just in case you need me.”
“Bik,” I said, touched by his concern, “I really appreciate it, but would that be wise? We’re going to climb a mountain of ice and fight a frost giant. Ice should be anathema to you.”
“What’s a ‘nathema?’”
I sighed. “Not nathema. Anathema. It means, well, oil and water, they just don’t mix. Neither do fire and ice. And you’ve been feeling puny for a while now, ever since The Spark started to fail in Hell.”
The pout on Bik’s face made him look like a thwarted toddler. “I wanna go. I might be useful to you. Besides, look at me. Do I look puny right now?”
I admitted that he did not. Surtr must have given the boy a tonic or something. In addition to his growth spurt, he was positively glowing with energy, but then he did that most of the time anyway.
“Fine,” I said, sighing again. “You can stay inside my parka. Uh, we do have parkas somewhere in that pile, don’t we?”
“Check, I mean yes, two of them, bright red, one large, for you, and the other XXL for … ”
“We all know who the XXL is for,” Orson griped. He was running his index finger down page after page. He was already a quarter of the way through the book.
Hmm. So maybe I just didn’t do the speed reading thing right.
“So what have you learned so far?”
“Crevasse … altitude sickness … oh, and that we’re a couple of chumps for even attempting this.”
“That’s positive thinking. Go, Orson, go.”
He shoved his lower lip beyond his upper one, blew at his mustache and made the hairs rise until they were perpendicular to his mouth. That was a pretty neat trick. “We’ll manage,” he said, quietly. “We have to.”
We needed a little more confidence than that. I got off the floor and spoke in a loud voice. “It will be a cold day in Hell before we successfully climb Mount Erebus.”
Orson looked at me in amazement. “Does that really work?”
I gave him a smug look. “How do you think I got my hair to grow?”
“I’ve been wondering. Been a little too busy to ask about it, though.”
“Well, now you know.”
I felt a rumble beneath my feet, but I didn’t know if that was the irritation of an angry Satan, if a dump truck had just driven by or if the fabric of reality had just shifted in our favor.
“Maybe I could lose some weight.” Orson stood and cleared his throat. “It will be a cold day in … ”
“Stifle, will ya?” I said and put my hand over his mouth. “Satan was furious with me over the hair. He’s burned it off twice now. I thought he’d let me buy a little insurance for our climb without getting too peeved, but if you wish yourself thin, there’ll be Hell to pay.”
“Okay,” Orson said, somewhat deflated, and sat back down to finish the book.
“Bik, I think we can dispense with the inventory. We probably have everything we need to make the climb. I’ll just stuff the gear in our packs and … ”
“No check,” the fire giant said. He was still on the linoleum tile, flame extinguished. “Dora told us that was the one thing she didn’t have in stock. Orson said you had a couple of burlap bags in the trailer you could use.”
“Great. It will be tons of fun using burlap bags to haul all this crap up the side of a mountain.” I grabbed two bags from the orange crate where we kept BOOH’s treats and started stuffing the gear into the bags, with the exception of the parkas and hammers. I replaced the one in my tool belt (the hammer, not the parka) with the one for climbing the mountain then put the second one on the desk for Orson. “We’ll look like a couple of St. Nicks, especially with those red parkas.”
“Especially me,” Orson groused as he turned another page. He was nearly finished with the manual.
I had both bags packed in a matter of minutes. There wasn’t much point taking care with the job; things tend to get jumbled up when you throw them into formless burlap bags. I did try to put the soft items on the outside, so we wouldn’t have things like, oh, pitons digging into our backs. “Ready,” I said, pulling the tie strings closed on the second bag.
“Ready,” Orson said. He had just finished the book, but he opened his bag and slipped the volume inside. “Just in case I need to check my memory on something.”
“But … but you know how to do this now, right?” I said hopefully.
“Crevasse … altitude sickness … oh, and falling, I picked that up too.”
“Cute.”
“Just a second.” Orson went to the back of the office and grabbed something else, adding whatever it was to the contents of his sack before pulling the strings tight again. “Now I’m really ready, or as ready as I’ll ever be. Can't say what I'm looking forward to more: climbing the mountain or battling a frost giant.” He'd been listening to my conversation with Bik, apparently.
“Well, one step at a time.” I didn't want to think about it any more than Orson did.
We slipped on our parkas and threw the bags over our shoulders.
“Ho, ho, ho,” said the not-so-jolly fat man.
“Very nice. Bik, I have a warm inside pocket for you to travel in. Bik?”
The diminutive giant was still on the floor, a thoughtful look on his face. “Steve, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about something that’s been bothering me.”
“Ah, sure, but later. This isn’t really a good time.”
“But … ”
“Listen Bik, we really need to get going. Maybe on a rest stop we can talk, okay?”
“Well, okay,” he said reluctantly.
“Good.” I reached over, grabbed up the little guy, and stuffed him in my pocket.
BOOH was waiting for us outside.
“I think we should tie our bags to our belts for right now. They’d be in BOOH’s way during flight. And afterwards, we’re going to need both of our hands for the first twenty feet or so.”
The weight of the bags, tied to our waists, was so great that we stood hunched over, as if we had spinal conditions. I wasn’t looking forward to climbing that infernal jungle gym with an extra fifty pounds hanging from me.
“Now, BOOH,” I explained, feeling a little winded already, “I know you can’t fly us to Erebus, but remember the ladder mounted near the base of the mountain, hanging from the ceiling of Level Two?”
“Or the underside of Level One,” Orson added, trying to be helpful.
“Yeah. It’s all a matter of perspective, I suppose. Anyway, if you can just get us
as close to the base of the mountain as possible, and within reach of that ladder, we’ll climb the rest of the way ourselves. Any questions?”
“Skree?”
“No, I think once we get on the mountain, you should fly somewhere where you can rest up. Listen for my call, though. I may need you quickly. Got it?”
“Skree.”
“Okay, then … ”
“Wait a minute,” Orson interjected. “You understand BOOH’s skrees?”
“Well, we spend a lot of time together. Now, let’s go.”
BOOH had finally lost all the extra pep he'd gotten from the Well of [Damned] Souls. In fact, he looked a little ashen. I hoped he was up to making the climb. Like the trooper he was, though, he scooped up the two of us - three, counting the little guy in my pocket - and shot skyward.
Unsurprisingly, BOOH flew a bit slower than usual on the climb to the base of Erebus. He seemed to be breathing harder than usual too. The temperature of Hell had dropped so much now that only in the times when we were within the actual Circles of Hell, surrounded by the molten rock on which each level sat, was the air warm. Orson and I had on our parkas, and we were human, so had at least experienced cold in our lifetimes. BOOH, well, he wasn’t used to this.
“Steve!” Orson yelled as we flew. “What do you think we’re going to encounter when we reach the summit?”
“You know exactly what we will encounter. A frost giant.”
“Yeah, you said that earlier. How about some details?”
Quickly I filled Orson in on my conversation with Satan. He needed to know that it was Ymir himself who would be waiting for us on top of the mountain.
By the time we reached the ceiling of Level Two, the giant bat could hardly breathe. The reverse gravity of Erebus, so close to us, was a giant hand, pushing against the efforts of my friend. I wondered how much longer BOOH could hold out.
“There!” Orson shouted. “There’s the jungle gym!”
“Ladder.”
“Whatever. There it is!”
Orson was right. There was the bright green ladder, and as I remembered, it was attached to the green fuel line that was poking out of the underside of Level One, where it made a perpendicular bend on its way to the base of Erebus.