by Dan H Kind
Chapter 22
The Elm of False Dreams
“Almost there, boys!” called Stephone. “It's just beyond that ashy knoll!” She turned back around when the boys waved, returning to her animated discussion with Becky Thatcher. The two girls had become fast friends during the trek across Hades, chattering and giggling almost constantly.
Team Myth had not seen a moving entity since they departed the Grove of Persephone. The scenery was gray ash, topped with more gray ash, piled upon more gray ash. There was no sun in the Underworld, only a sourceless pinkish twilight that hung around like a dread wraith and sucked the life out of everything. The sky swirled with black clouds, funneling and churning, yet not the merest breeze blew across the surface of the vast, vacant dustbowl below.
Hades reeked of a mixture of spoiled eggs, charred flesh, and ancient, ingrained decay to which it was impossible to grow accustomed. When walking across the abyss, kicking up the ash—which stung like thousands of tiny, vindictive mosquitoes when it got into the lungs and eyes—was unavoidable. Stephone had borrowed a handful of bandannas from Sir Arthur, which Team Myth tied about their faces to prevent inhaling the choking particles.
Despite the monotonous terrain, Jack enjoyed talking to Tom along the way. Sure, at times it felt as though his brains had turned to liquid inside his head and would soon dribble out his ears from the constant chatter, but it had overall been quite entertaining. Tom first regaled Jack with tales of his and Huck and someone named Jim's adventures.
“Y'know, Mister Whiskey, this place kinda reminds me of the Sahara Desert.”
“You've been to the Sahara?”
“Yup. Me and Huck and Jim traveled across the Great Desert, back when I was an erronort.”
“Back when you were a what?”
“Back when I was an erronort.”
“Tom, what the hell is an erronort? Sounds like some kind of bird.”
“Well, they're airborne like birds, all right. Seriously, you ain't never heard of an erronort? The guys that ride around in the great big hot-air balloons?”
“Ah. You mean an aeronaut.”
“That's what I said. An erronort.”
“Er . . . right.”
Jack, inundated with stories of adventure and fantasy, could hardly differentiate between what was true and what Tom had made up on the fly. During lulls in the stream of dialogue, Jack threw in a good number of his own comedic, and often rather disgusting (at least by modern standards), tales of his own and his Trickster buddies' past exploits.
Presently, Jack and Tom were yet again walking together, fifty yards behind the girls.
“Finally, we're getting somewhere! What d'you reckon this Elm'll be like, Mister Whiskey?”
“I don't know. But that mound up ahead is the first change in elevation I've seen since we started this endless hike, and that's gotta be a good sign.”
“Say, what time is it, Earth-time, anyways?”
Jack pulled the pocket-watch given him by Sir Arthur from the cargo-pocket of his khakis and brought it to his ear. It was ticking, all right, but not nearly as fast as it had been on Earth; it seemed a good minute passed with each lallygagging click.
“It's ten till noon.”
“That's it? Jeez, it feels like we been here for days.”
“We have been here for days. Or at least it seems that way to us. But we've only been here about three hours, Earth-time.”
The girls stopped at the summit of the dune and waited for the boys to catch up.
“Look!” said Stephone, pointing ahead. “The Elm of False Dreams!”
Jack's breath caught in his throat at the sight. The Elm was a paradigm of arbor-hood, with a midnight-black trunk. Millions of leaves, shimmering with a silver-white light, moved of their own accord about the Elm's branches, drifting from limb to limb, swirling around and about its trunk like sparkling otherworldly fireflies. Sometimes a glittering leaf would fall from the tree and disappear in a puff of smoke when it touched the desolate gray ash littering Hades.
But the Elm of False Dreams was not what robbed Jack of inhalation and scared him out of his ever-loving wits. That was the long ribbon of ebony evanescence flowing underneath the boughs of the Elm in a living river of darkness. He could feel the death-like cold emanating from the shadow-river from atop the hill—and it chilled him down to his Trickster essence.
“Wh-what the hell is that?” stuttered Jack.
“Those are the shades of the dead,” said Stephone. “They are on their way to the shore of the Marsh to be ferried to Judgment.” She scanned the distance, then peered up into the seething Stygian sky as if looking for someone.
Team Myth shadowed the shades to the Elm. The shades had slender limbs that seemed much longer than they should have been. Featureless humps of darkness rested upon their shifty, indistinct torsos. They flitted within their predetermined path, pulled to Judgment like moths to fluorescence, the more determined passing through the stragglers like the ghosts they were.
Team Myth trekked on. The Elm's trunk was acres wide and towered into the sky like the corpse of a skyscraper. The utter blackness of its bark was in starkest contrast to the silver leaves that fluttered between its branches like shooting stars taking their sweet time getting to wherever in the cosmos they were going.
Stephone dropped hands to hips and scanned the area. “Now where could he be?”
The leaves fell in a surreal mercury rain. Tom and Becky sat down, leaning against the trunk, giggling and trying to catch them before they dissipated into nothingness when they hit the ground. Jack stared upwards in awe. A descending Leaf landed on his forehead and tickled when it made contact with his skin. It disappeared in front of his eyes, and made him feel queasy inside.
“Wow,” he said, wondering if the Leaf was now a part of him. “That is some weird shit.”
“Boy, it sure is,” said Tom. “If you pay attention close, you can see and hear . . . things. Flashes of images. Bits of conversation. Pieces of forgotten memories, mebbe.”
“False hopes and dreams that shall never be,” mumbled Becky, leaning on Tom's shoulder with half-closed eyelids. “They're so beautiful. And yet so terribly, terribly sad.”
An almost narcotic melancholy descended upon Jack, and he dropped down and leaned on the Elm. The three of them sat there, looking up, transfixed by the falling leaves.
Then something big dropped through the Elm's boughs.
Tom jumped up, fumbling for his slingshot. The dog barked from Stephone's sleeve. Jack ripped his gaze from the Elm and attempted to focus. He lurched up, stumbled, and fell into the ashes with a WHUMP! He gazed up through bleary eyes and saw a billion blazing silver comets hurtling across the firmament.
“Jack!” yelled Stephone. “Can you hear me?” She turned away. “You might have to give him mouth to mouth, Hermy. I think the Elm's got him entranced.”
Jack awoke with a start when this last statement registered with his sluggish brain. “No, wait! I'm . . . I'm okay,” he said, not believing it himself but hoping it sounded convincing.
Jack was helped to his feet by many arms. Blinking, he glanced around at the concerned faces of Stephone, Tom, Becky—and someone else.
“Those False Dreams really knock it out of you, huh?” he said to no one in particular, then turned to face the newbie. The dark-haired stranger was tanned and muscular, his physique coinciding with what he was: a Greek god. He wore a Chicago Cubs baseball cap tilted sideways and a Kobe Bryant #10 USA Basketball jersey. From his neck dangled a gold-link chain with a diamond-encrusted pendant that bore an aesthetic amalgamation of the letters 'HMT'. His jeans sagged down well below his waist, and he sported brand new basketball shoes. A pair of foot-long white wings jutted from the sides of each shoe, protruding outwards into reality from the Swoop.
“Jack, this is Hermy,” said Stephone.
“Say, you look just like this dude Mercury I met a few millenniums ago at the Worlds' Trickster Convention,” said Jack. “
You guys could be twins, actually.”
Hermes/Mercury shrugged. “Hermes, Mercury, Thoth—I am none of them, I am each of them, and I am all of them. Above all, I am myself. Check it, yo: the Romans, when they conquered the Greeks, assimilated their mythology into their own. Often, not having much of a creative vibe, they simply renamed the Greek gods. Example A: the fair Persephone here is Proserpina. Zeus and Jupiter are one and the same, Dionysus is Bacchus, Hera be Juno. The list goes on, down to the most worthless deity in the Greek-Roman Pantheon, which in my opinion would be Priapus aka Viagra, the ancient Greek god of erectile dysfunction. As to why erectile dysfunction needs its own god . . . let's just say I couldn't tell you truthfully and keep a straight face.”
A moment of thoughtful silence ensued, which no one seemed inclined to break.
“Anyways, back to the elementary school lesson. This crusty old Underworld was originally ancient Greek, but nowadays it's modeled mostly from Virgil's Aeneid, which has the best descriptions of the place of any of the olden classics extant. If other texts are uncovered with some new info on this depressing-ass World of Myth, it'll change to match as the new knowledge spreads across the Key World. That or spawn different versions of itself into infinity. But we don't wanna go there or we'd be here for years. Oh, and Virgil was a Roman dude, in case you didn't know that already.”
Jack was confused. “So you and Mercury are—technically speaking, of course—the same person—I mean, the same god—deity—mythological being, that is.”
Hermes/Mercury played his fingers across the diamonds on his pendant. “That's right, Trickster. Mythos change form and essence all the time. They merge and combine. They split into twos, threes, fours, and sometimes more than that. Straight up, these days you never really know who's who in the Worlds of Myth without straight up asking a bitch: 'Yo, who the hell are you, muthafucka!?' Shit, these days you might as well call me the ancient Greek god of”—his deep voice went sing-song and he grabbed his crotch—“playaaaaaaaaaaaaaas.” With his other hand he pantomimed a gun, which he pointed at Jack's head like this was a stickup.
“Uh, right,” said Jack, and Hermes dropped the guns—both of them.
Unsure as to whether or not this strange, jive-talking mytho was right in the head, Jack glanced at Stephone, who shrugged and smiled.
“So,” said Hermes, stretching his bronzed arms in leisurely fashion, “you kids ready to roll?”
Jack sighed. “More walking across desolate, featureless wasteland it is.”
A rogue's smile spread across Hermes's chiseled features. “Walking, you say?” He chuckled. “Nobody's walking anywhere, amigo. Don't you see my stylin' kicks? They're the new Air Jordans—modified, of course.” The messenger god busted out a moonwalk, kicking dust into Jack's eyes. “Homie, I got wings.” He stomped his feet, the wings attached to his shoes began flapping, and he levitated into the air. He extended his arms skyward, kicked once, and flew through the boughs of the Elm and up into the sky like an ancient Greek Superman, trailing a wake of silver leaves. Five seconds later he was hovering before them once more, as if he had never left.
Jack was impressed; he'd always wanted to be able to fly. He recalled an ancient incident involving himself, some wings, and some geese. “Yeah, but there's four of us and only one of you,” he said, thinking of his failed flights of long ago. “We all can't just ride on your back, can we?” He really hoped they couldn't.
“You won't be riding on my back,” said Hermes, smirking. “I've got four limbs, and there's four of you—perfect combination, right?”
“You can't be serious! Can you hold us all without dropping us?”
Hermes gave a telling snort, his shoe-wings flapping as though impatient to get into the sky. “You can hold on, one to a limb, while I fly. And if you fall, well . . . you'll survive. It might hurt like an effing bee-atch, but you'll survive.”
“Why don't we just walk it?” gulped Jack, giddiness running through his veins. “Maybe the landscape will get a bit more, well, better, as we go along.”
Stephone placed a reassuring hand on his arm. “Jack, we have to destroy that Hoppy Heaven Ale and get back to the Key World as soon as possible. Hermes can take us to the edge of the Acheron, and from there we'll walk the last few miles to the dock.”
Jack gulped again, then swallowed down his fear (it tasted like beery vomit). “Well, okay, I guess. But if I fall to my extremely painful non-death, I'm gonna be very, very angry.”
The girls grasped Hermes's biceps, the boys each grabbed ahold of a winged Air Jordan and a muscled ankle—a much more precarious position by far, thought Jack—and Team Myth sailed off into the forlorn gray yonder.