Persephone Underground

by Jennifer Russon

  “I can think of something,” Mami Wata replied. “Let her live at my house. We could use a maid. Persephone, would you like to spend the summer at my place on the Boulevard of Champions? I’ve gotten on in years and it’s a total mess. I can barely cook a thing. I can pay you more than you’d make here – but it’s just for the summer.”

  I was so drugged, I don’t know how it is Hayden left us without my noticing. It was just me and his grandmother now, negotiating the terms of my kidnapping. I accepted the job in a hoarse whisper. I told her I really didn’t feel well and that maybe she needed to call me an ambulance.

  “Hayden brought his car round. He’s going to take you to my house,” Mami Wata said slowly. “So you can rest…”

  He must have carried me out and driven me to the Boulevard of Champions, miles away from this pretty restaurant. But I saw none of it. My consciousness went as black as the ocean floor.

  Chapter

  4

  I woke up in my own room – or at least, I thought I had at first. I was covered in a blanket from my own bed, and my hamster, Snowball, was running furiously on his little wheel. Someone had deposited his cage on the dresser in this room. A big box of hastily packed things – my things – spilled out of a cardboard box. Someone had gone to my apartment and packed me up for the summer by the looks of it.

  My stomach turned over from hunger. I reached down for my purse because it had a granola bar in it, but someone had taken it. My cell phone was missing too. One of those breakfast-in-bed trays sat perched at the foot of the bed, and I made a dive for it – began to stuff my face. The arrangement was lovely – a single yellow rose in a vase, and big bowl of luscious Caribbean food, with fresh bread rolls and lemonade.

  I watched myself dispatch the food in an unusual mirror, hanging on the opposite wall. It was framed in sea shells and coral, pieces of spiky driftwood. It looked hand-made and gave me the creeps – like I could fall into it and into another world if I stared too intensely at my reflection.

  The drink was particularly good. I chided myself for that. Hadn’t I already gotten in so much trouble drinking things from Mami Wata? The lemonade had an aftertaste of lavender and powdered sugar. It was so good it made my toes curl. There were boiled green bananas and spicy cod fish, tangled in fresh thyme, with a savory presentation of ackee fruit. I was proud of myself for identifying all the ingredients in this dish.

  I was a good culinary student – an angry culinary student.

  I thought you said you could barely cook a thing, I wanted to spit into Mami Wata’s face. I struggled with a mix of hate and gratitude as I looked around this room. To judge her by the crosses and pictures of saints on the walls, this was a woman of faith. Is that why she brought my favorite teddy bear to this cozy, doily covered prison cell?

  Maybe there was a soft side to this evil voodoo queen.

  Lace tablecloths covered both nightstands, as did candles of different sizes and tallows. They were not the kind of candles you found at the mall. They were creepy. A lock of blonde hair was coiled and trapped under one of the picture frames on the walls.

  The pictures on Mami Wata’s walls were as intimate as they were confusing. In one, she posed with a dead ringer for Hayden, but upon closer inspection, it was some other Native American man. There were photos of her with twin girls she appeared to be babysitting in a forest; and still more photos of a 1930s girl playing the piano – those pictures were all black and white, with scribbling on the bottom: Phoebe in Belize.

  A plush chair sat in the corner of the room, with a foot stool so you could comfortably read. This looked like the master suite. Had she given me her room?

  The door to my new bedroom was cracked open, and I could hear Mami Wata talking on the phone in the kitchen; she had the caller on speaker – and that’s when the goose bumps and cold sweat took me over from head to toe. She was speaking in my voice to my mother!

  To hear my own voice being imitated like that was really something. She effected my every verbal tick. It made me want to vomit.

  “Thanks for sending your new friends over to meet me,” I heard my mother say. I was worried about you at first, but I think you and Mami Wata will get along well this summer.”

  “I know, right?” The fake me, coming out of Mami Wata’s mouth replied, dopily. “I’m going to get a million service hours helping Miz Furr’s mom out. She’s going to write a letter to the dean at my first pick college,” the fake me said, before wrapping up the call.

  So they’d gotten to my mom. They’d hypnotized her. I listened to her hang up, wanting to run into the room and say, “Mom, mom. I’ve been kidnapped! Please send help!” but instead I ventured into the kitchen where the mysterious old woman was waiting for me, and thanked her for lunch.

  “You slept just long enough for Hayden to get your things. He’s gone back for your car now. You left it at The Pomegranate. It took us a while to find your keys,” Mami Wata said.

  I decided not to react angrily to the information they’d rifled through my purse.

  “Are you going to kill me?” I asked calmly.

  At this Mami Wata threw back her head and laughed. “Heavens no,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes with the heels of her ancient hands. Looking at them in the light of the kitchen, I could see she was older than I originally thought – maybe even 100.

  “Doing chores ages me horribly,” she said. That’s why you’re here. To cook and clean, and perhaps marry my grandson….”

  She paused, stared at the cracked terrazzo floor until she found good enough words to look me dead in the eye. “Hayden is lonely, living here with me. His parents...well, they just don’t want him. They don’t want the black magic, and all the responsibility that comes with it. If I can find a companion for my grandson – one he can spend an eternity with – then we can finally move on.”

  Her language was chilling. I didn’t ask her to explain herself – didn’t try to dissect what she meant by “eternity”. For all I knew, she was just exaggerating and being corny. I’m gonna love you forever – didn’t a million songs say that? Then again, maybe those women from The Pomegranate – those missing persons retired into cold cases by police – had been chosen to be Hayden’s wives too.

  My imagination worked overtime. Maybe the old woman simply wanted “to move on” because her rickety little home on the Boulevard of Champions was in a high crime area. The houses around here, rattled when trains went by. It was all churches and funeral parlors – homeless people walking along the busy roads with plastic bags full of fried food. It was nice to be taken to Mami Wata’s relatively quiet part of North Lauderdale. Her house sat in the sleepiest pocket of the city and was surrounded by ancient trees.

  Mami Wata watched my face; the egg you could have cracked and cooked over my head as my brain worked furiously to make sense of what was happening to me.

  “I’m too tired to tell you everything right now,” she said getting up and moving out of the kitchen with the assistance of a cane. “I’m going to lie down, but I do invite you to look around, my dear. There is nothing I will not allow you to see. Hayden made me agree to that. He wants you to see every little nook and cranny in our home. He wants me to stop hypnotizing you. No more secrets.”

  A tea kettle whistled on the stove. Mami Wata indicated with a nod that I was to take it off the burner.

  “Do you want tea?” I asked. She shook her head.

  “You have some. It’s a homemade brew – but only drink it if you want to explore beneath my tree out back. The tea will help you see better down there. It’s too much to take in otherwise. No one can believe it sober – no one can believe I have rooms underground. Not in Florida.”

  We both looked out the kitchen window, which was open. Sheer yellow curtains swayed in a gentle breeze, playing over the stack of dirty dishes in the sink. The tree was a massive banyan with knobby roots that appeared to almost pull it up from the ground.

  I ran over to the stove and switched off th
e heat – eager to get a better look. I could see there was, in fact, some kind of root cellar under that tree. I told Mami Wata I would eventually take a grand tour, but sip tea here in the kitchen until Hayden returned.

  “We can explore together,” I said.

  Chapter

  5

  I didn’t drink the tea – not yet anyway. My reasoning behind this was to see Hayden with my own two eyes – without the bias chemically (or was it magically?) inflicted on me at The Pomegranate. It was a smart choice because low and behold, when he pulled up in my Beetle and got out of the car, he was not the stunning Indian man I remembered. Don’t get me wrong; he wasn’t a troll exactly. He still – from what I could see looking out of Mami Wata’s kitchen window – had a gorgeous face, but he was painfully thin – to a degree that he looked ill. Even more skinny than me. I wasn’t used to being heavier than the other guy, but in this case maybe I was.

  His jeans were what kids at school accused our whippet thin algebra teacher of wearing: Mom jeans. Hayden wore a striped, long sleeved shirt that by some accounts would seem a poor choice for summer. By others, it was a smart way to keep people from staring at his pipe cleaner arms. He was taller than me, but I could have taken him in a fight.

  When he glimpsed me standing there, Hayden waved shyly – almost apologetically.

  That’s right, I thought angrily. Be sorry for holding me hostage, motherfucker. Having now seen how he actually looked sans magic, I began to formulate a plan to run away. I’d convince him to take a walk with me, lure him into a public area with witnesses and scream my head off for help.

  The screen door to Mami Wata’s modest little house, with its sagging front porch, banged closed and within minutes my husband-to-be was standing before me in the kitchen. I offered him some tea, which he declined.

  “No, I wanted to see you…really see you without any of the usual hocus pocus,” Hayden said. His voice was deep and soothing – the kind of guy who should do audio books.

  “She drugs me too, you know,” Hayden shrugged. He sat down heavily at one of the table’s four chairs – all estimated 110 pounds of him causing it to scrape lightly.

  “Well,” I prompted him. “Will I do?” My voice dripped with sarcasm, and maybe a tinge of disappointment in myself. I hoped Hayden couldn’t tell how much I liked his face.

  He had such a beautiful mouth – full lips, but not overly so. His nose was a work of art; his brown eyes twinkling with the kind of intelligence that made me wonder how much traveling he did. We looked about the same age, though I knew he was five years my senior. I am almost 17 and a half. Or I was. This whole wild ride with the Furrs had convinced me maybe I was dead, or dreaming. Maybe I never existed at all.

  “You look even prettier today than you did at The Pomegranate,” he admitted. I could see his cheeks warm up when he said it. “That wasn’t bullshit when I told my grandma that you are different from the others.”

  My heart jumped at his mention of “others” – obviously these had to be the girls who made up the urban legend about The Pomegranate being the best place in all of Ft. Lauderdale to get yourself kidnapped. I needed to secure Hayden’s trust, so I didn’t ask him to elaborate. I kept things simple.

  “Different how?”

  “Well, for starters, you are the first of the girls we’ve kidnapped to not ask about Mami Wata’s name.”

  OMG, he just admitted to the crime! I thought of my phone going to waste on the other side of the room. I should have been recording our conversation.

  “It’s ‘Mommy Water’ without the Caribbean accent,” I shrugged. I took humanities last year, and read a brief chapter in our text book about the Mami Wata legend. I got up, poured two cups of the tea, and told Hayden as much.

  I was sure that this Mami Wata, holding me captive, was not the real deal I’d read about. The real Mami Wata is a mythical creature, who can alter a person’s fate, read minds and live forever because she is actually a mermaid. People pray to her in Africa and the more superstitious parts of South America. I told Hayden I was impressed by his grandma, but I didn’t believe she was the actual legend I’d read about. Without being insulting, I gave him my opinion of the old woman sleeping down the hall.

  “She’s good at hypnotizing people, I’ll give you that. But I don’t believe you guys guessed where I lived or anything like that. I think you went through my purse and looked at my driver license first. I think you make people see fantastical things by putting roofies in their tea.”

  Hayden laughed at loud. He blew on his tea, but declined to drink any. I loved his hands, wrapped around the cup – the fingers long and emaciated, but somehow powerful looking. I wanted him to touch me, but cleared my throat saying nothing of my desires.

  “So you don’t want to look under the tree and see our root cellar yet, eh?”

  I was staring down into my drugged AF cup of tea when he asked me. I’m the bizarre sort of person who can watch the Matrix and root for the characters to take the boring pill, rather than the red one. When I read stories like Bluebeard, I can’t identify with the wife who, forbidden to enter a certain room, does so anyway. I shy away from danger. I knew that I would eventually drink the elixir in front of me and see the Underworld beneath the tree out back, but I just wasn’t ready today.

  Hayden cupped my chin in his hand, and raised it so we could look into each other’s eyes. “Come walk Fury with me,” he offered gently. The moment he said it, I heard a dog bark.

  He rose from his chair and went outside, me at his heels. He had a leash in his back pocket and called out to Fury, who I could see – as we approached the tree – lived beneath it. I stood back, too afraid, frankly, to get close to this well concealed root cellar. No one driving by would sense there was room the size of a dungeon down below. You had to sit and position yourself before you could jump down and access its terrifying little door – a white door smeared with dirt.

  Hayden braced his skinny hands on two thick and overlapping tree roots and jumped down, feet first. He opened the door just wide enough to free a black pit bull from the dark recesses. “That a boy, Fury,” he cooed, snapping his leash to the fierce looking dog’s spiky collar. He pulled a step stool over, so the powerful beast could get a little help leaping out of hell.

  We took Fury on a two mile walk down the Boulevard of Champions and crossed the street, where a big Catholic church and cemetery stood waiting for us with its gaggle of walking paths. I hadn’t given up on my idea to let the general public know I was kidnapped, but Our Lady in Heaven seemed like the wrong place to do it. Allyson Cox was sleeping here, after all, and I needed to show some respect.

  I charged ahead of Hayden and the dog. After all, I knew this cemetery well, having been here just a couple of weeks ago to have a grand mal seizure when I learnt no college on earth wanted me. I was like a wind up doll out here, and even though it seemed like an insane thing to do, I made a B-line for Allyson’s tombstone.

  Hayden and Fury followed me to the grave. Her tombstone had a cartoon sunshine wearing sunglasses, chiseled into the left hand corner. Once, I’d had a laughing fit over the stone before dissolving into guilty tears. If you were going to be struck dead by a woman named Joy, this was just the sort of grave marker you were meant to have.

  Once again, my eyes filled looking at her grassy plot, always rife with flowers and stuffed animals – the occasional Mylar balloon. Her picture was on the stone in a porcelain oval: sister, daughter, friend, it said beneath.

  Hayden pulled the dog back to prevent him from taking a leak on Allyson. “Why are we stopping?” he asked.

  “You’re psychic, right?” I sobbed, succumbing to emotion. “Don’t you know, my mother is a murderer?”

  ‘We did know,” he replied softly, pulling no punches. “We only pick girls with a troubled past. Girls who think they’d be better off d—….”

  Something made Hayden decide not to finish the sentence. Instead he reached into his pocket and produced a tissue.
After I blew my nose, I let him pull me into his side in an awkward half embrace.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Persephone,” he whispered into the top of my head. I think I felt him kiss my hair. I couldn’t be sure, and yet I weirdly hoped so. I had Stockholm syndrome and I hadn’t even been held captive one day. Maybe I’d find the strength to run tomorrow.

  We were just a few blocks from Mami Wata’s, who I had learned a great deal more about on our walk. Hayden told me she was in mourning for a dog and had her eye on stealing one that was new to this very neighborhood.

  “Wow. That’s awful. So why doesn’t she rescue or adopt another one like a nice, normal person?” I was genuinely mortified.

  Hayden explained his grandmother had to have a specific pure breed to be happy.

  “She loves Papillons, ever seen one? They have the big butterfly ears and are small, yippy little things. Grandma has had a black and white one since she was a child. Domino is the name she gives every single Papillon she gets. She replaces them within a few weeks of one dying on her. The last Domino succumbed to old age on Cinco de Mayo,” Hayden said.

  “They’re all named Domino?” I asked.

  “Don’t you think it’s a good name for a black and white dog?”

  I shrugged.

  And as if on cue, Hayden and I saw a black and white Papillon jump out of a moving van. Two middle aged white people were moving into a house about a stone’s throw from Mami Wata’s place. They appeared to be married. The woman was in good spirits. She had eye catching, curly red hair that fell to her waist in kinky curls. She also had an infectious laugh that made me like her instantly. Hayden and I stood with Fury, who watched their moving process with a cock of his drooling head.

  The couple unloaded crates full of flower pots and books in the driveway. The plates on the truck indicated they had moved here from California. I don’t know why but I decided they were teachers. I hoped I would see them again at Bad Ass Academy, on the right side of a desk.