by Zachary Howe
He had scattered dreams that were too disjointed to be intelligible, but some returning actors were recognizable, as well as some new faces in the forms of the deformed Fates. His dream closed with a winged messenger hurtling towards him until his eyes were stung with a blinding flash of light, and he awoke with a start.
“You all right, Gordo?” Atalo asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Gordie said, and he meant it, because today was one of those days where he woke up feeling rejuvenated, like he could do anything. It was different this time, though. This time he recognized it, and excitement flared inside him. “In fact, I’m great!” Gordie bestowed his grandpa with a winning smile, which he returned in kind.
“Well, that’s good news!” Atalo said. “We just flew over the Alps and we’re somewhere over Italy now. Little over an hour left I’d say. I gotta take a leak. I’ll be back in a few.”
As Atalo got up, forcing the little Greek man to do the same, Gordie began to marvel over his reawakened powers. He could feel strength coursing through him, and he wondered how he had never recognized it before. He began to wonder, too, why he had it now. He couldn’t have been asleep for more than two hours, so what caused the change? Then he realized that it was after midnight back in his hometown.
“No way,” he whispered to himself, ignoring the sideways look of confusion coming from his harried, hairy aisle mate. Was it possible that this power came in twenty-four-hour cycles? And if so, was it aligned with Central Standard Time?
He thought it had to be, considering the evidence, and this strange notion almost made him laugh out loud. Apparently he was going to have to keep track of his original time zone while romping around Europe. This could get confusing, he thought to himself.
As Gordie remained lost in thought, it took him a moment to register his grandfather’s return from the bathroom as he took his seat next to him. Gordie looked up to convey his newfound revelation to him, but, buffeted by a wave of shock, he realized that it was not his grandpa seated next to him.
“Go to the restroom,” Hermes whispered to the little Greek man, who, more confused now, rose and headed off to the lavatory. Then the God of Thieves turned back to Gordie, resplendent in a pearl white robe, and fixed him with a brilliant smile worthy of a toothpaste advertisement. “Good morning, Gordon,” Hermes said.
“What the . . . How the . . . Where did you come from?”
“Back there,” he pointed over his shoulder.
“I mean how did you get on the plane?” Gordie asked, annoyed.
“I am the messenger of the gods, am I not? A deified errand boy,” he snarled. “There is nowhere I cannot go.”
“Where’s my grandpa?” Gordie asked, with that incandescent form of anger rising inside him that only this Olympian was capable of eliciting.
“Oh, do not fear! He is fine. He has only decided that he must use the bathroom a little while longer.”
“If you hurt him—”
“Come now, there is no need for that. I did not harm him. Where is all of this anger coming from? I thought we left one another on good terms! Admittedly, we met on rocky conditions, but I thought we had moved past all that.” Though his tone suggested that he was hurt, his sheepish grin told Gordie otherwise.
“All right, why are you here?”
“It occurs to me that you and your family may need a little guidance. You seem to be blindly heading for Hephaestus’s forge at the moment, and I am not sure that is entirely wise.”
“Wait. Do you know what happened there?” Gordie asked. “It was his volcano that erupted, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. In fact, I was there at the time of the eruption, or at least, immediately before it,” Hermes said, flipping a hand in the air. Gordie waited for him to expound, but he did not, as was his custom.
“Well? What happened?”
“It is complicated,” he started, much to Gordie’s frustration. “You see, Hephaestus has a very complicated relationship with his father, and I recently tried to recruit him to our side, as it were. He was not responsive. One thing led to another, and he caused his forge to erupt, expelling me from his den.”
“Is he dead?” Gordie asked in a whisper.
“No. My brother is immune to fire, but I am not. By the way, I am unharmed, thank you very much for asking.”
“Well, I see that,” Gordie retorted. “So, what does that mean? What should we do?”
“As I said, that is why I am here. You need a guide who is a little less preoccupied than I—a teacher, of sorts.”
Gordie racked his brain. “You mean Chiron?”
“Smart boy! Not just brawn after all.”
“Okay, so where am I supposed to find Chiron?”
“You will have to retrieve him, of course.” Gordie gave him a quizzical look and Hermes added, “From the underworld.”
“The Underworld?” Gordie asked. “How the hell am I supposed to get there?”
“I’ll take you. Or I’ll drop you off, more precisely,” he said. “Remember, this is not Hell, as you call it. This is Erebus. Hades. What have you. You will not necessarily fall into a pit of fire, although those do exist there. Now, would you like to see a trick?” he asked, and a deep sense of foreboding began to gurgle inside Gordie like the magma in Hephaestus’s volcano.
“No, thanks,” he said, leaning away, hoping Hermes would let it go.
“Too bad.” Hermes clasped Gordie’s shoulder and snapped his fingers.
In an instant Gordie went from sitting in his uncomfortable airplane chair to longing for it. The rumble of the plane was deafening as he floated in midair behind it, watching it fly away from them at breakneck speed. Hermes was grasping his shoulder, but it was somehow sufficient to keep him afloat. However, his tender grip did not compensate for the thinness of the air, or for the frigid temperatures thirty-five-thousand feet above Italy. Gordie gasped for breath and shivered uncontrollably, while Hermes addressed him as if they were still comfortably aboard the aircraft.
“Here we are, directly above your next destination!” he chirped, the miniscule wings on his sandals and cap beating furiously. “I see that you are rather uncomfortable up here, so why don’t I hurry things up. You’re going to go to the King of the Underworld and ask to bring Chiron back, got it?” Gordie was turning blue from cold and lack of oxygen, staring at Hermes with wild, bulging eyes. “I unfortunately cannot accompany you, but I will make sure you get there . . . expediently. Have a safe flight!”
He realized what Hermes intended to do and his brain flooded with hysteria. He grasped at Hermes’s robes as the trickster released him. Gordie beseeched him with full-moon-sized eyes, but with one sharp shake of his leg, Hermes detached him, and he began his descent.
Gordie lacked the breath to even scream as he plummeted towards earth. He could feel himself losing consciousness as terror overwhelmed him like a pigeon caught in a tornado. His eyes rolled back into his head and everything went dark, until he was splashed back to reality as he fell through a wisp of cloud, leaving him soaked to the bone. Ground seemed so far beneath him, yet it appeared to be reaching for him, cradling him into its grave.
Gordie realized then that Hermes had never intended to drop him off in Hades: he had planned for him to die and end up there. It was at that point that all hope of survival drained from him and was replaced by deep despair. He thought about Bridget and their last encounter on the plane; his mom and grandpa above, searching for him; Noah’s crushed skull, which Gordie’s would likely resemble in a matter of minutes; and lastly, his dad’s empty stare as he lay pinned under a heavenly skewer that became his headstone. Maybe he would get to see his dad again very soon, Gordie thought, whether or not he was prepared for it. Fear, anger, sadness, confusion all swirled inside him, but a glimmer of bliss splintered through the darkness with the prospect of reuniting with his father.
Tears were streaming from his eyes as he plummeted towards his end. The ground rushed towards him. Only a few hundred feet remaine
d as he fell in silence.
Two hundred feet.
One hundred feet.
Fifty feet.
He crossed his arms over his face to minimize the immense pain he feared he was about to endure. Through a sliver between his arms, Gordie saw the ground inches below him. He could see every pebble, every grain of sand and dirt, every microbial bacteria crawling around like he was suspended in time—and then this illusion exploded as he blasted into the earth.
Fire erupted from every inch of his body. Pain paralyzed him. But then he realized he was still falling. The layer of earth that he had crashed into was only a foot thick. He had broken through it, and was now in a subterranean chamber, approaching free fall again. He opened his eyes as thick red fluid flowed over them, and his heart sank when he saw a solid stone floor a hundred feet beneath him. He doubted that he would be able to break through that one, and he expected it to hurt a thousand times more. Blood and tears flowed upward as Gordie whispered in a hoarse, broken voice, “Not again,” before he crashed into the rock.
The sound of shattering stone like a shotgun blast echoed around the cavern upon which Gordie had intruded. He came to rest in a small crater. His body felt like it had been run over by a steam roller, run through with a thousand samurai swords at once, then dropped in a vat of lava, for good measure. But if he was dead, why could he feel such immense pain? He lay face down on the cool, splintered rock, feeling his chest rise and fall with ragged breaths.
The pain was overwhelming, but it was fading. Lying in a puddle of his own drool, blood, and mucus, Gordie started to believe that he was still alive. With the greatest effort he had ever willed his body to respond to, he rolled over onto his back.
Hundreds of feet above, a hole in the ceiling of the chamber mockingly framed a sunny day with blue skies on Earth. Gordie stared at the brilliance of it in wonder, until he noticed that the hole appeared to be shrinking. He squinted at the edges of the rift and realized that it was stitching itself back together. Bemused and intrigued, he watched as the gap narrowed until the earthen quilt was completed, and he was dowsed in darkness. He lay in the pitch-black cave, feeling incredibly drowsy and almost grateful for the lights being turned out.
As he felt himself fading to sleep, or maybe something more permanent, his eyes were set ablaze with the light of small fires popping into existence. Lifting his head ever-so-slightly, he could see torches lining the walls and, for the first time, he noticed the gurgle of running water.
He wrenched himself into a sitting position—every inch of his body throbbing in protest—to gaze upon a lazy, jet-black river.
“What the hell?” Gordie whispered into the emptiness. He heaved himself forward and crawled to the bank to get a glimpse of this eerie canal. As he approached the water’s edge, he expected to see his reflection looking back at him, but the water of this stream was so black that it didn’t even reflect the light of the torches. Like a brook of trundling smoke clouds of water jostled over and around one another.
Suddenly aware that he was very thirsty, Gordie dipped his hand in to scoop some to his mouth, but he recoiled; the fluid was so cold that it burned. He lifted his left hand to his face in amazement as he watched little black crystals form around it like an obsidian glove, reaching halfway up his forearm. As soon as he began to fear that his hand would be encased in ice forever, the alien substance pierced into his skin from all points of contact at once, like a sharp and painful osmosis. In another instant, both the ice and pain were gone.
Gordie flexed his hand in front of his face, turning it around, trying to find some sign of damage, but it appeared to be unharmed.
“Crazy,” he whispered to the nothingness. He looked left then right. The river ran on into the darkness. The opposite bank of the river was only a few feet wide before it met uneven brown limestone walls rising as high as the eye could see. This wall held the torches, spaced every fifty feet. In either direction he could only see little globs of light surrounding the blazes, but there did not appear to be much for them to illuminate. He stared at the river for some time, not really thinking about anything, just sitting, staring in awe.
After a few minutes, he tried to push himself to his feet. Although his body was very sore, the pain had dissipated, and he was able to stand on strengthening legs. He looked down at his feet standing on the same brown stone that constituted the walls. Little cracks ran in between his shoes and he turned to look down on the small crater he had left in the rigid floor. He walked to the center of it and knelt down, tracing his fingers over the spider web of broken rock. As he felt the pain further melt away from his limbs, he began to experience a giddy feeling, and, gazing down on his landing pad, Gordie began to laugh out loud. He fell to his hands and knees, once again gasping for breath, but this time it was out of unadulterated joy, as were the tears streaming down his face.
As his giggle fit began to stem, his breathing returned to normal. With one last sigh of relief, he pushed himself back to his feet and looked straight ahead. That’s when his stupid grin melted from his face.
Standing directly in his line of sight, no more than twenty feet in front of him, was an enormous dog. Its front paws were the size of basketballs and spaced five feet apart, splayed beneath squat, chiseled shoulders. Its remarkable breadth must have been an anatomical necessity because, where one pair of eyes should have been staring at Gordie, six malevolent, bloodshot peepers were glaring at him from three colossal heads.
Standing before Gordie was the three-headed mongrel guardian of the Underworld, Cerberus. Each head looked like a Rottweiler’s, but twice the size. Their massive jaws were bared in vicious scowls with puddles of drool streaming to the ground. Gordie didn’t know how long the behemoth had been watching him, but, considering the bone-rattling audibility of its growls, he assumed he would have noticed the dog-beast earlier had it been around for a while.
What was even more breathtaking at the moment, though (if it was possible to focus on anything beyond Fluffy), was the landscape to which Cerberus was acting as a barricade. Over its shoulder and between its snapping heads sprawled an endless field populated by some sort of drab, unrecognizable flower. No discernible border existed between the rock and the vegetation, just a seamless transition where the stone floor ended and the foliage began. There was a hazy gloom resting over the meadow, somewhere between the consistency of mist and fog. The haze was so faint that it was hard to tell if it was visible or imagined. Sparse trees broke up the monotony of weeds here and there. They were not of a species that Gordie had ever seen. They looked like oaks, but, unless the gloom was augmenting their appearance, they appeared to have black trunks and black leaves. There was no wind present, but even if there had been, Gordie had a feeling that those branches wouldn’t ruffle—they just looked too dense. Nesting deeper still in the gloom was the outline of a house, a quaint little house with what looked like a brick chimney on the roof. Confounded by this scene out of Little House on the Purgatorial Prairie, Gordie was snapped back to reality by a thunderous snarl from Cerberus.
He began to step backwards as an automatic bodily response to this new terror, but he froze when the middle head let out an earthquake of a bark.
“It’s okay,” he tried to say as his voice quivered. “Good boy. Just take it easy.” Gordie’s eyes darted back and forth between all six of the dogs’; he noticed that each head had different colored eyes: the left head had irises as red as molten lava—in fact, they even appeared to be ablaze; the right head had violet eyes like bright scales on a tropical fish; and the central head had eyes of pure ebony, the irises almost darker black than the pupils, like they were made out of the same fluid as the sooty river behind Gordie.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Gordie explained to the monster, as if it had that concern. “Why don’t you just go on home? Go on, get.” Gordie shooed it away with a gentle wave of his hand—a decision he immediately regretted.
Releasing a battle cry from all three heads that woul
d put a Tyrannosaurus Rex to shame, the dog pounced into the air, spanning the distance between them in a single leap, its violet-eyed head missing Gordie by inches with its snapping jaws as he dove to his left. He rolled over and sprang back to his feet in a crouched wrestling position. Before Cerberus turned to face him again, Gordie saw the great, corded musculature of the beast from head to tail, which itself was as thick as an anaconda, and fifteen feet long.
As if it had noticed the admiration, the demonic cur slammed its tail into the crater that Gordie had left on arrival, fracturing the already beleaguered stone even more. A crack grew from the point of impact, traveling towards Gordie as if a bullet train were boring through the bedrock inches below the surface. The sound of splintering, like lightning striking a tree, reverberated around the cavern, and Gordie had a revelation: What if this cavern was not the bottom floor? What if there was another space beneath this one, just as this one had been hiding beneath an apparent ground zero?
As Gordie considered this possibility, the goliath turned to face him once again, preparing for another attack. Gordie crouched into the ready position again, this time more primed for another pounce, but the beast just snorted. Looking closer, he noticed that those snorts were producing little puffs of smoke from each nostril and his eyes flew open with surprise, realizing, in the nick of time, what the scoundrel intended to do. Gordie dove aside as a jet of flame burst out of all three heads, singeing some leg hairs in the stream of hellfire.
As he dive rolled again, Gordie started to become panicky over the array of weapons his enemy had at its disposal. Looking closely, it seemed that breathing fire took somewhat of a toll on Cerberus’s body. All three heads were coughing and wheezing—it might have been adorable if the beast weren’t so terrifying. Gordie decided to make his move while it was recovering.
He sprinted toward its flank and leapt into the air. Arching his back and jutting out his chest, he raised both hands above his head, clasping them into a double fist. He released a clichéd roar—because it seemed appropriate—as he descended towards the center of the destabilized crater. He tucked his feet, landed on his knees, and smashed his fists into the center of the depression with all his strength.