by Ryan Casey
He sat down on the right side of the brown sofa. Stared over at the opposite wall, a duck-egg blue shade, newly painted since he’d last been here. Or maybe he just hadn’t noticed it last time. He could tell that Susan was looking at him. He knew she was watching him. But where did he start? What did he say?
“Ashley, you need to help me out here,” she said. She moved a few more books out of her way and onto the floor, which was already scattered with various professional-looking documents, a laptop with a coffee stain on the wrist rest area the centrepiece of the room. “You need to tell me what—”
“This is going to sound completely insane,” Ashley said, feeling his cheeks heat up a little as he did and his stomach tense. “But…but what do you know about Saturn?”
Susan blinked a couple of times. There was a blank expression on her face. “Saturn?”
“Yes, Saturn. The planet. With the sixty-something moons—”
“Well, I’m an astronomy PhD. So…I know stuff about planets. But I don’t see what—”
“What about this—this hexagon? What do you know about it? Or—or Dione. Or Tethys. Anything you have. Anything that can…that can help me.”
“Ashley,” Susan said. Her face wasn’t blank anymore. Her eyebrows were raised, creasing her forehead. “Please just…What is this? You aren’t well. Would you like me to phone somebody? Would you like me to phone any family or…”
Ashley pressed his hands to his face. He felt a lump moving up his throat. A salty weight creeping towards his mouth in the form of words as he sat here on this old fuckbuddy’s sofa. “Grace, she…She was dead and now she’s alive and she…Hexagons. She started etching hexagons into the kitchen floor. And talking about some year of the reptile. About Tethys and Dione and Saturn and—and being the mother of Tethys and Dione. Oh, and she’s pregnant.”
Ashley moved his hands away from his eyes as the salty taste of his tears kissed his lips. “There’s that. Missing for a year and now five months pregnant apparently. But it’s not her, Susan. Like, some of the time it’s her. But most of the time…it’s like she’s there, somewhere behind those eyes, but she’s buried under layers and layers of rubble still. And there’s something else nearer to the surface. Something…something winning. And I…I don’t know why I’m here. You’re right. I probably am ill. I’m probably mad.” He rose to his feet. Started to rush towards Susan’s door.
“Wait, Ashley, I—”
“No, Susan, no. You’re right. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be here. I just…I should’ve searched the Internet first. But—but knowing you. Knowing all this stuff you know about space and—and all the weirder things too. The spiritual stuff. I just thought you could help. But I’m sorry. I’ll go now.”
“Ashley,” Susan said. She said it quite sternly. So sternly that it made Ashley turn back around, like a kid being collared by a dinner lady in the schoolyard.
“You know there’s an unexplained hexagon on Saturn, right?”
Ashley nodded. “Yeah. I know about it. Some hexagon on the north pole, something like that. But I just wondered if you knew anything. But nobody knows, apparently.”
“Not in science they don’t, no.”
Susan was looking down. She wasn’t looking Ashley in the eyes anymore, and her voice had quietened.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
Now, Susan looked back up to him. She scratched at her knees, through her grey jogging bottoms.
“Susan, what—”
“Scientists might not have any solid theories about Saturn’s hexagon yet. But like you said. The weird stuff I know. The more spiritual side of things. That…that’s a different matter.”
Ashley walked back towards Susan. His heart raced. “Do you know something? Something mythical? Something that—that might be able to help?”
Susan bit her lip. She frowned. “All I know is that you’re probably going to want to take what I have to say with a pinch of salt. But that you’re also going to want to sit down.”
TWENTY-THREE
Ashley sat on the edge of the brown sofa in Susan’s flat. His phone hadn’t vibrated since he’d been here, which was good—for now. How long had he been here, anyway? How long before it started to look suspicious? Would anyone even think to look here? Even Grace?
But then he remembered some of the looks in Grace’s eyes. The detachment behind that pearly blue gaze. She knew things. Saw things differently. Perhaps she’d seen him here all along.
“Okay,” Susan said, rustling around on the chocolate-brown rug in the middle of the cream carpet. “Got it.”
She had been rooting through a pile of papers that were spread across the floor. Papers that Ashley could only assume were something to do with Susan’s astronomy PhD research. Except, knowing her passion for the sky, its links with theology, all that, it wouldn’t surprise him if these papers were hobby pieces rather than actual work.
Susan planted a pile of papers on Ashley’s lap. He flinched away from her hand as it almost brushed his leg. His cheeks reddened. He hoped she wouldn’t notice. But shit. It’d been quite a flinch. At least they had other things on their hands anyway.
“What is this?” Ashley asked, as he looked through the neat, unscuffed papers on his knee. Some of them were print-offs about the hexagon on Saturn. Others were strange drawings—inverted stars, crosses, weird stuff like that that used to always creep Ashley out about Susan a little bit. She once tried to get him to use a ouija board with her. Perhaps that was the beginning of the end of their affair after all.
“It’s a load of information I found about Saturn. About the hexagon, mainly. There’ll be a few other things slipped in there, though. I have my way of organising things.”
Clearly, Ashley almost said, after spending the last few minutes watching her root through her papers and curse under her breath at her lack of success.
“What’s important to know is that Saturn’s hexagon was first spotted in 1982 by the Voyager. But it kind of got swept under the carpet a bit until it was revisited back in ‘06 by the…the Cassini mission, I think. Anyway, long story short, the Cassini mission could only view thermal images of this hexagon on Saturn’s north pole. But in ‘09, it started to become visible by light.”
“Like it’s coming to the surface?” Ashley asked.
Susan cringed a little, like he was speaking a foreign language without making any effort to nail the accent. “Well, kind of. But anyway, sticking to the facts…”
“Right,” Ashley said. “Sorry.”
He turned over another page. Saw a picture of Saturn on its side, the hexagon clearly visible on its north pole, like it had been etched there by a human hand.
“Want a guess at the size of this hexagon? In relation to Earth?”
Ashley shrugged. “I dunno. The size of America.”
“It’s 8,600 miles long. The Earth—the whole of Earth—is 7,900 miles in diameter.”
“Holy shit,” Ashley said.
Susan nodded sharply. “Pretty friggin’ big, eh?”
Ashley turned the page over again. On this one, it looked like a university essay stuffed with all kind of big words that Ashley couldn’t be bothered even trying to get his head round. “And nobody in science knows why it’s there?”
Susan chuckled. “Science would love to pretend it has the answers to everything.” She perched herself back on the edge of the sofa and opened up a black, leather-bound book. Ashley could smell the musty age of it even though he was several feet away. “But the truth is, Saturn is way out of science’s comfort zone.” She placed the book, the pages of which were yellow and dusty, on the sofa between her and Ashley. “The spiritual theorists, however. They have a few things to say about it.”
The first thing that caught Ashley’s eye when he glanced at the opened pages of this book of Susan’s was the angelic figure in the middle of the page
on the left. It had huge wings on its back. On its muscular chest, which also had breasts—it really was an androgynous thing—there was a hexagon etched there. And surrounding this winged being, there was another group of smaller winged beings, all flying around in various different manners, all of them with hexagons etched on their chests.
“Who are these guys?” Ashley asked. His mouth was dry. He really needed a drink. The hexagons that seemed to follow Grace’s every move. And the wings. She’d mentioned wings, hadn’t she? It was all crashing down on him. Grace couldn’t have known what she knew about Saturn’s mythology. She couldn’t have just known it, could she? She hated all that spiritual stuff.
“This is Saturn,” Susan said. She pointed at the large, muscular androgynous figure in the middle of the crumpled, rough yellow page. “And these are her children.”
Ashley gulped. The smell of vanilla was strong in his nostrils. A reminder of all the wrongs he’d committed in this house. A reminder of him stepping out of line. How much he was stepping on eggshells now. He should go. He should leave. This was nonsense. A coincidence. It had to be.
“These two here,” Susan said, pointing to two of the larger children floating around on the left. “These are Dione and Tethys.”
Ashley gripped firmly on the papers on his lap. His girlfriend was injured. She’d passed out again. And here he was, liaising with a former fuckbuddy. What kind of a monster was he?
“Susan, I…I—”
She flipped the page. More dust kicked up as she did. Ashley swore he could taste it in the air. “This book is called the Book of the Ancients. Original, I know, but they didn’t have much competition back then. Amazon keywords and Google SEO weren’t their thing. Anyway, this book suggests that the God of Saturn was addicted to having children. That he would stop at nothing in order to procreate. But…putting this in…well, terms you’ll understand—no offence—every time he—”
“You said Saturn was a ‘she’ before. And now it’s a ‘he’? What is it?”
Susan’s cheeks went red. She shook her head fast. “Saturn’s a god. He, she—doesn’t matter. Anyway. Every time Saturn wanted to bear a new child, she’d have to make a sacrifice. Good thing for Saturn was that she always gave birth in threes. But this sacrifice…”
She paused. Stared at Ashley for a few seconds, speechless.
“Make a sacrifice to who?” Ashley asked. He only just realised he was on his feet again, unable to keep himself still with a mixture of nerves, misunderstanding and disbelief in the questions he was asking.
Susan lifted her eyebrows. “I warned you about sitting down.”
Then, she turned over a page that Ashley had previously been holding on his lap.
Ashley’s knees went weak when he saw what was there.
It was a drawing. A sketch. An old sketch that Ashley was very familiar with.
A portrait of a creature with deep, reptilian eyes and a long, narrowing face.
Its skin was covered in scales.
No, not just scales. Hexagons.
“Who…” Ashley started. His mouth was dry. The vanilla. The smell of vanilla. How wrong he’d been. How wrong he was to be here.
The scales.
The eyes.
“The year of the reptile…”
“Like I advised, a seat would’ve been wise,” Susan said.
“This—this drawing,” Ashley said. He pointed at the page with his shaking hand. “How did you—Grace drew this. She drew it in her—in her Pukka Pad. How did…”
Susan had actually gone rather pale. She gulped, and moved her left hand up her right arm and back down again. “You…Maybe you should go. Maybe—”
“Who is this drawing of? Where did you find it?”
Susan moved her glasses away again. Wiped the lenses on her jogging bottoms.
“Tell me, Susan. I need to know. Grace drew this. She drew this, and it’s—”
“Eromus Reptilia,” Susan spat. “Eromus Reptilia. Queen of…Queen of Reptiles. You can find this image on the Internet or in old books if you do enough searching.”
Ashley’s skin shivered. He felt a wall of cold hit him. A thought combination of “This is fucking insane” and “Grace knew about this. She’d spoken about this. Something was happening to her.”
“Who is it? What does it mean? Grace—how is this related?”
Another pause from Susan. Another shift of her eyes.
“I can’t tell you what this means for Grace. But Saturn. In other scriptures—and remember, these are just old theories—Saturn is the Mother of Hell. The…the hexagon. The hexagon is the gates of Hell. The gates of Hell where—where Saturn’s offspring is born.”
Ashley shook his head. He wanted to shout down this nonsense. But the taste of sweat on his lips. The things Grace had said. Her…her pregnancy. It was adding up. In a fucked-up, twisted sort of way, it was adding up.
“If—if Saturn’s the mother and the hexagon is the gate, then who is this Eromus thing?”
Grace looked down at the sketch of the reptilian creature. Looked at its deep-set eyes. Its thick scales.
“He’s the guy who taught Satan how to be evil.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Ashley got off the bus outside the hospital. It was getting dark outside way too early. Cold rain splattered against his cheeks, the day a far cry from the relatively sunny days of April so far.
He looked at the hospital in the distance. The once-white walls were now covered with grime and moss. A place he was growing far too familiar with since Grace’s return.
He lowered his soggy hood as he stepped inside and made his way across the main corridor. Apparently, Grace was going back in for a scan after her collapse in the police interview room earlier. Her second major collapse—seizure, or whatever anybody wanted to call it—since she’d come back. At least others had witnessed it this time. At least it wasn’t just Ashley’s word against Grace’s apparent obliviousness.
But as he walked down the corridor, past the fumes of fried food and the clinking of cutlery in the cafe, something else was firmly on his mind.
Eromus Reptilia. Queen of Reptiles. And Saturn. Saturn and its children. Saturn, who sacrifices one of its children whenever it wants to give birth to another three.
The hexagon on the planet of Saturn.
As much as Ashley ran it through his mind, his damp shoes squeaking against the white tiled floor of the hospital, he couldn’t for one second believe it. Could he? Susan did know her stuff about the ancients and their weird facts and theories. But there couldn’t actually be a real “Eromus Reptilia” out there. It must be a metaphor for something else. Saturn was a metaphor for the planet Saturn, so Eromus Reptilia had to be elsewhere. Another planet. Another spacey thing. If it was even anywhere at all.
He reached the top of the stairs he had been climbing, sweat dripping down his face so much that he could taste it. He turned the corridor and saw a sign for Ward 19, where apparently Grace was. With every step he took, his stomach tightened up some more, the sudden reality of everything adding up in his mind.
Grace had died.
Grace had come back without as much as a scratch on her body nearly a year later.
Ashley’s stomach knotted some more as he turned the corner into Ward 19, where people buzzed around from bed to bed.
Grace was pregnant.
He looked around all the beds for Grace. There were about six beds in this ward, which smelled of old people. The majority of them were in fact old people. The ward was gloomy because of the cloudy sky outside. He looked at the first bed. He looked at the second, the third and the fourth. But Grace wasn’t in any of them. None at all.
He turned around and looked at the sign above the ward entrance once again. Ward 19. Mr. Wisdom had definitely said that Grace was at Ward 19, hadn’t he? Shit. Thinking about it, Ashley hadn’t even gone
back to his flat to “get anything” at all. He’d been to Susan’s. He’d have to come up with an excuse. An explanation of where he’d been. He couldn’t just say he’d been to Susan’s. Even if he did tell the truth, he wasn’t sure he wanted to share his astronomical findings with his should-be-dead, Saturn- and hexagon-obsessed, mythically pregnant girlfriend.
He took another look around Ward 19, but he was pretty certain Grace wasn’t anywhere in there. An old man with a balding head and tubes sticking out of his nostrils was in the first bed. Between him and an old woman surrounded by sad-looking family, there was an empty bed. Elsewhere, there was—
Wait.
Ashley looked back at that empty bed. He looked past the blue bedsheets and over at the white bedside cabinet. He swore he could see what he thought he could. He walked back in that direction. Walked closer to it, just to check he was right—just to check he wasn’t going completely insane.
But no. He was right. Beside the empty bed, on the bedside cabinet, there was a silver bracelet with little glittery pieces of imitation diamond scattered around the outside.
Ashley picked it up. Rubbed his thumb against the contrasting rough and smooth exterior. Grace’s bracelet.
“Sir, are you okay there? That’s—that’s someone’s belongings.”
Ashley turned around in the direction of the female voice behind him. Standing there was a nurse wearing a blue uniform. She frowned at Ashley with her dark brown eyes, focused on the bracelet in his hand.
“You have to put that down, sir. It doesn’t belong to you.”
“Grace,” Ashley said. He lifted the bracelet then moved it back down again, caught in two minds about what to do with it. “She…Grace Wisdom. She’s my girlfriend. This is her bracelet. Where is she?”
The nurse frowned some more. She looked down at a clipboard that she had pushed up to her large breasts, and read something on there. She looked back up at Ashley, then back down at the clipboard, then back up again.