by Gin Eborn
The landscape was dark. Not like night, but there was no sunshine, and there was no moon. It was sort of like being inside a flat picture. He looked human, but definitely not from my part of the world. The air filled with whispers encircling us from every direction.
“Great. They know you’re here. The only thing we can do is hide you until I figure this thing out. I had better not get into any trouble because of you.”
“They?” I said tying my bird skull back on my pouch.
“No talking. Trust me. You don’t want them to find you.”
I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. Not exactly a hero’s welcome.
“Sorry,” I started again, “but are you Blue Eagle?”
His body stiffened as he posed in front of me. I pulled back. He was a little too close.
“Blue Eagle? No, no, I am Thomas.” He paused. “Holy shit. A living human. How the hell did you get here? Do you know what they do to living humans down here? Have you any idea?”
Good thing I’m a Calypso.
“I’m sure everyone here has a lot of questions for me. The whole two-legged betrayal thing, but I was told Blue Eagle would be waiting for me and—”
Thomas looked at me sideways, and his eyes got small and squinty. He put his hand on his chin and started shaking his head.
“Lady, I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t know where you think you are, but where you are is not in the land of the living. So if you were expecting living beings, well, somewhere in your travels, you made a serious wrong turn. Oh boy.” He got all of that out without taking a breath. He chewed his thumb nail. “I mean, this is no place you want to stay. This being an Underworld and everything.”
“I’m in an Underworld?” I was so terrified I laughed. “I left hell to come to a mother fucking Underworld? I am going to wring Aldon’s neck when I see her again.”
Underworlds were forbidden in Calypso law. The mixing of the dead with the Earth’s caretakers was considered an abomination. We were even trained to create repulsion walls around us to keep them away as we slept. I heard a story once, of some kind of entanglement between one of us and one of them. But Mom would never speak of it. She used to say it was just a Hallow’s Eve tale.
Thomas interrupted. “Come on, tell me the truth. Who sent you here?”
“No one sent me here. I was told I needed to cross over through the veil and light the Dream Lodge fire again. The Dream Lodge in Alphazia.” I sounded ridiculous.
His face turned to marble. Frozen. Carved. Not quite real. A slight curve up on the right side of his mouth.
“Oh. You.” He cocked his head to the side. “Okay. Come with me. We must move very quickly.”
He grabbed my wrists and pulled me into a full run. Landscapes changed in instants. Left foot on dirt. Right foot in snow. Left foot in a river. Right foot in sand. Left foot in red clay. And then as we stopped, both feet in grass. It was a meadow. I couldn’t help but reach down and stroke the silky blades. How long had it been? Fisher and I were laughing out in the field near my house. Dusk on a spring day, blowing dandelion spores into the air. It was the most painful memory of joy.
Thomas yanked me again. Ahead of us was a great big, beautiful tree with golden, shimmering leaves. Beyond the tree was fog that floated and folded in through the air in every direction. The tree broke the white landscape with limbs intertwined high above the trunk. The golden leaves rustled with the faintest hint of a melody.
A tree. I’m safe under a tree.
I glanced behind me wishing the staircase would magically appear. Wishing Fisher would be standing on top of it. Thomas’ face slammed into mine.
“We have no time for your hesitation. Just keep moving.”
My fist reached back, ready to wallop him, but I shook it off. He might just come in handy navigating the damned Underworld.
We reached the tree and stopped. I nestled up under her limbs, turned, and rested my back against the trunk. I needed to catch my breath. Thomas, however, started right back in on me.
“Now you listen. This place is the home of the Arae. Do you know who I am talking about?”
“No.”
“You are in the land of vengeance demons. You should never have come through here. They can see you, you know. See into you. This is their place. You are the one who came uninvited.” I was not really sure if he wanted to warn me or scold me. Maybe it didn’t really matter, because staring at Thomas, I was acutely aware he was dead. He had no chandy light nor was he the darkness of the Coals.
His lips pushed forward. “You haven’t heard a word I just said, have you? You listen to me. You stay right here. Don’t move. The tree will protect you until I can figure out what to do with you. Any chance you know what to do to get to the other side? I mean, how in the hell did you get here?”
“We used this pendant.” I touched the skull around my neck. “It opened a stairway and I climbed up to here.”
“Up? Boy, that’s rich. You didn’t go up! You went down.”
“No, I climbed up some stairs. Stairs in the rock face right behind the waterfalls.”
He tapped his foot on the ground and crossed his arms. His eyes looked away and then snapped back as he sniffed me. It was offensive. “Ah,” he said, “I smell a coyote.”
I choked on my spit.
“Was there a coyote by any chance?”
“Yes.”
“And what happened?”
“I stabbed her and threw her off the steps into the water below.”
His eyes pulled in tight and stared. I kept waiting for him to laugh, but his face remained still.
“But up is down and down is up—and so you tossed the coyote up to the prayer bands while you have come to—”
“The Underworld.”
“An Underworld.” He laughed out loud and then pulled himself in tight and small against my body. He was cold. “Man, oh man. You didn’t go up. You went down which is exactly what the coyote wanted.”
A wind blew from one side of the meadow to the other.
“The Arae know you’re here. We have to get you up and over to the other side.”
“Are you a— ”
“Vengeance spirit? No no no no. Men can not be vengeance demons. Men are here to look after the vengeance demons.”
“You mean like a guardian or something?”
“Not exactly. Indentured I think is a good word.” He seemed proud like it was a good title.
“How the hell did you get here? What did you do?”
“You do not want to know.”
His eyes left me cold, and I only felt that way around Coals and one other group of pompous pretenders. “You were Regys.” My jaw locked just saying it out loud.
He snorted. “Worse than that.”
“What could be worse than being one of them?”
He looked at me sideways. “I’m the one who dropped the pesticides.” Every vein in my body popped.
“You?”
“Well, there were a lot of us dealing with the food issues up there. If you only knew all the ways we altered food before any of the real changes even started. All the chemicals we used. I’d see someone eat a strawberry and think, boy, you just poisoned yourself. The glaciers melting were nothing compared to what came in the wake of it. The rise of the bugs. The damned insects. The rising carbon dioxide was a gift at first, I mean, the grain grew—but so did the infestations. Then we just started drowning the land with increasingly strong pesticides. Oceans invaded the farmlands; the animals began to die; the plants began to die. Then the people. It was reverse evolution. All at once humanity and civilization just evaporated.”
“And everyone thought you were saviors.”
“Kept us in power. Until the droughts—and then the fury the Earth unleashed. Hurricanes and floods like we never imagined. Boy, those floods. Just made the chemicals more potent, and all we could do was watch as they ran into every orifice and every drop of drinking water. We had our own
, of course. Hidden food and water supplies, but then the animals fought back.”
“The PRM-TU1 virus.”
“A perfect storm. What can I say? We were all just greedy assholes. Our fatal flaw was we didn't know it would happen so fast.”
“You think that was your fatal flaw? Really? Underestimating the Earth’s response to you?” The heat rose up into my face. “You actually thought you would take care of yourselves—do whatever you wanted and the next generation would just have to figure it out?”
“Something like that.” His undefended demeanor surprised me. “So, I was given a choice when I was killed off. I could come here and serve the ladies, who seek vengeance on people like me, or I could just go back to our hell world and see what happened.”
I swallowed audibly.
“I chose to help the ladies. Better choice.”
“I could kill you for what you’ve done.”
“Too late.” His voice held a hint of sadness.
“What you and your kind did—”
“Look, I can’t go back, okay? But I can help you. So, let’s get you where you belong.”
“Why are you helping me?”
“The prophecy.”
“Does everybody know about this fucking prophecy but me?”
“The Regys know of it. They were hunting for you. Take you out. Take the Earth back.”
“Why want a dying planet?”
“Wouldn’t be dying. You don’t have a clue about any of this, do you?”
“A clue about what?”
“This is a Celestial war. And you are at the center of it. If you light that Dream Lodge again, well, everything can go back to the way it was. Maybe. All of this—the battles and the vengeance and the Earth dying. It can all be stopped. Or maybe right now is a good time for a takeover.”
“Celestial chess.”
“Now you’re getting it.” The winds blew again.
“We have to hurry.” He started choking like someone had a hold around his neck. His whole body spasmed. “Oh, oh no. I have to go. Stay here. I’ll come back for you. But don’t move. You hear me? Do not leave this tree or you die and I get sent back. Which is not okay!”
He jerked and moved and twisted and vanished inside the fog. I sat with my back against the tree. I sat for hours. For what felt like hours. The pressure inside me couldn’t be dispelled.
Until I heard the chimes.
Chimes clinked somewhere off in the distance. Beautiful little sounds dancing in the breezes. A wispy wind blew and a path opened through the fog.
Don’t do it. It’s a dirty foggy path leading away from the one place you are protected.
Thomas wasn’t back yet, and my mind was playing tricks on me.
What if this is a sign from Thomas? What if I am supposed to go down the path? What if the only way he could tell me where to go was to lead me using this path?
I stood and looked around. I had no way of knowing if my bird skull magics worked in the Underworld, but I couldn’t wait any more. Celestial war? All I wanted was to get George back where he belonged and hop back up on Fisher’s hips. The temptation won as I stepped just outside the ring of the tree. Nothing happened.
“Thomas?” I called out, more impish than obedient.
Nothing.
Well, I have to get to the other side and this could be the path.
Impatient. The tree disappeared behind me as I walked up and over a knoll and straight toward a house in the distance. A white house. My white house. The house I grew up in. The chimes danced on the front wraparound porch with gray, painted wood planks. The front door open with a screen door holding the space. I could almost hear the spring screeching the way it did when it opened. And then the slam.
“Maggie?” I was deep in my daydream. “Maggie!”
I opened my eyes just as Mom walked off the porch.
“Mom?” First a whisper and then as my feet just started running down toward home, it became a yell. “Mom!”
She opened her arms and a smile filled her face. She smelled like her laundry detergent as I draped myself onto her shoulders.
“This can’t be happening.” I pulled back and looked into her magical green eyes. Magic because one was more of a gold then a green. “You can’t possibly be here.”
“What are you talking about, Maggs. Of course I am here. Where have you been? I have been baking up a storm in there and you just vanished on me.”
“You’ve been baking?”
“It’s your father’s birthday. I reminded you last night. Don’t tell me you forgot already? I’m making his favorite—”
“Pineapple coconut cake with the seven-minute frosting.”
“Well, of course.” She put her arm around my waist and we walked up the front steps through the screeching screen door and into the front entryway. Stairs up to the left. Walls of deep blue and white trim. Dark walnut floor boards. The mark on the floor to the right where I tried to carve a checkerboard when I lost my real one.
“Honey, if you could get the table set, that would be such a big help. I’m thinking Granny’s china. The one with the pink flowers?”
I walked down the hallway past the reading alcove filled with green velvet cushions. A book was still sitting on the side table under the lamp. Out of Africa. My favorite. The bookmark of a mermaid I’d gotten from the coffee shop up the road.
The horrid smell of roast and potatoes reached me. I was always so grateful Fisher never expected me to make him food. But Mom always did that for Dad as we sat and had our coffee or wine.
I drifted back into the hallway and off into the dining room on the right. The mahogany table was there with a full arrangement of chrysanthemums and greenery. Brass candlesticks with red tapers were already burning with a Alcyone figurine beside each. On the side board, the glass cake stand etched with delicate flowers and leaves that held the tiered coconut cake oozing with icing.
Mom poked her head in from around the corner of the kitchen.
“Now don't you dare stick your finger in that,” she laughed. “Honey, china?”
That wasn’t right. I closed my eyes and stood very still.
Do not be distracted. Focus.
I looked at the room through a squint. The mirror over the side table was missing. Dad’s birthday was in May, but the table was set for Winter Solstice. I took a slow, deep breath and closed my eyes again. It was silent except for the chimes. No sound of spoons on pans or oven doors. There was nothing.
“Everything okay, sweetheart? He’ll be here any moment,” came her voice from the kitchen.
This is not right.
I backed up, each muscle contracted. Right foot back. Left foot back. Back to the edge of the doorway and into the hallway. Crashing sounds outside. Loud. The floor seemed to shift. I turned to run back down the hallway and out through the foyer. Through the front screen door I saw nothing but fog. No path. The air suddenly so cold I shook.
“Honey?” Mom’s voice called out.
Through the fog, a darkness moved closer. I tried to see what it was, but there was no time.
“Where are you?” she called.
My chest pounded. The fog pushed in and the blackness had arrived.
“Run,” came the familiar voice I always regretted not trusting. “Go now!”
I got to the front door. A translucent figure appeared in front of me with its teeth bared and a voice screaming in shrill tones of tortured pain.
“Honey, your daddy’s home.” She was behind me. Her hand touched my left shoulder, pushing, as the thing in front of me started to suck me forward with big breaths. Cold, so cold.
My only option was up the stairs to the right. I dropped down and bolted. My legs pushed as fast as I could up one flight of stairs to the landing and then up another flight. There was a scream from below. I glanced back to see both of them coming. Slowly, but coming. Two rooms at the top and a long, dark hallway that went into fog. I had no choice. The hand touched me. I lunged forward and wa
s just about to go full throttle into the foggy abyss when I saw the shine of a glass doorknob on the wall to my left. My hands grabbed it as I fell down and slid. They were laughing at me. Louder and louder came the laughter.
Please. Please.
I turned the knob, and the door released just in time for me to jump through.
Silence.
I fumbled for a lock until I realized there was no door. In full darkness, my hands ran along the wall looking for a light switch, slamming into a corner and down another wall. Searching, feeling, and then something moved. Something warm slowly rolled its body over my fingers and onto my hands. Undulating. I screamed.
Laughter filled the air. I tried to see anything, glancing in every direction.
“What do you want from me?” I spoke to the darkness.
More laughter. Then I heard them.
“We are fascinated that a living human is here. A human has come to us. Well, this is rare indeed. We are thrilled to have you here. We think we will keep you. We will keep you as a pet potentially. We do think this would bring us much pleasure.”
“I did not mean t—”
“We want you to stop that. Stop that disgusting speaking thing. So loud. You humans are so loud. Make those noises all the time.”
“Can you hear me if I just think thoughts?” I asked in silence. There was no response.
“We think you are not going to be happy. We like it when humans are not happy. We are so happy when humans feel the full curse of their behaviors.”
“What curse?”
“Stupid. We know you are stupid. We have already decided that about you.”
“I didn’t do anything. I am here—”
“We know why you are here. You are the one who doesn't know why you are here. We see you are shame. We see all the humans and what the humans are.”
A slither ran over my foot.
“Ah, we love your fear. We love it so much. We want more fear.”
“No, please, I just want to—”
Lights came on. The room was a kitchen. An old kitchen from a farmhouse with wooden cabinets and metal latches. Faded yellow. A window over the sink with nothing outside but the whiteness. A canary yellow, metal table in the center of the room under a hanging glass globe light. Two metal chairs at the table with twisted backs. A refrigerator—old and rusty. A faded yellow and white linoleum floor. Two doorways. One opened into darkness. The other with a white curtain over the window into the whiteness.