Persephone Underground

by Jennifer Russon

  We were going to his parents’ house for dinner and then dropping by The Pomegranate too see a comedy show. It seemed unfair to have such a night planned. I mean, I just found out my boyfriend wasn’t real – that somehow his mother, my principal at Bad Ass Academy, had given birth to an immortal freak.

  Were they also immortal, Hayden’s parents? Did they practice the black arts and grow tails in their bathtubs? I knew his dad, Lucas – owner of The Pomegranate and probably a bazillionaire – was a racist slime ball who cut checks to the NRA. Maybe that was even worse. He fit the profile of an immortal monster from hell, I guess.

  I composed myself before I walked back out of the mausoleum. Hayden was sitting on the grass with his pit bull, his knees drawn up to his chin, waiting for me with a heartbroken look on his face.

  “Summer is over. You can leave me…now that you know I’m the undead. Run away like the others.”

  Something told me he was lying. If the others had run away, it probably meant they were safe. I don’t believe anyone gets out of knowing Mami Wata and her grandson alive. What I did next was calculated, but I wanted to play my cards just right and make sure I got taken down for a tour of the Underworld. I pulled him to his feet and surprised him by kissing him hard on the mouth.

  He returned the passion tenfold. I felt his teeth graze my bottom lip, tasted blood. It made me wonder if I was wrong about all of this – if I wasn’t hearing him right and he was a real person like me – with warm blood coursing through his veins, but it was my own blood; I just wanted, with all my heart to believe otherwise.

  Hayden whispered in my ear, we should do it in the mausoleum – no one would see us; he picked me up bride style and attempted to carry me inside, telling me he could tether Fury to the weeping angel. I said, no, not like this. I wanted our first time to be special. I wanted to be treated as his Queen and consummate whatever it is we had in the Underworld.

  I thought he hadn’t listened – that he intended to rape me inside his family’s tomb, because he carried me inside it. However, this – like so much else in the world of Mami Wata – was just another portal to a different world. Behind the pedestal where I found his sketch pad, hung a tapestry of ice blue velvet. Just before I lost consciousness, Hayden pushed it aside with his hands, stepped through with my limp body in his arms, and called Fury to follow us.

  We were under his grandmother’s tree.

  Chapter

  8

  Except for knowing I had just lost my virginity in a four poster bed draped in heavy red curtains, I knew absolutely nothing else. Not even where I was. I just lay there staring at a ceiling that undulated like molten lava. I was afraid embers would fall and catch on the bed. From the sound of water dripping, and echoes of laughter in far off rooms, I gathered I was in some kind of underground castle. I heard water slapping, as though boats were making their way down subterranean canals.

  I heard forks and knifes, scraping against plates. Music played outside as well – just a girl singing acapella while she strummed a guitar. I heard him applaud her.

  “Wonderful, Cora,” a more confident, baritone version of my beloved’s voice declared.

  The girl continued singing. I recognized her name from the sketch book in the Furr Family’s mausoleum. We had entered through there. One day I would look back at my amazement over this as naïve. There were infinite ways to see past reality, and access the Underworld. You merely had to suspend all disbelief and try. I have to say that for a little girl who dreamed of falling into a hole with the white rabbit, I had grown up and hit the jackpot.

  This was Hayden’s kingdom, and I, lucky girl, was in his bed chamber. Was I lucky? He was gone, but the sting of his kisses on my neck and throat remained – a pounding ache between my legs. The boy whom I knew from the surface – the geeky Hayden –would never have been so brutal a lover. The altered Hayden had left bruises all over me.

  How I missed the old one! I should have been elated a specimen as fine as the magically altered Hayden had done the…honors of popping my cherry, but still. This version of him was overly serious and cruel. This version wouldn’t have worked puzzles with me at the kitchen table each night, or helped me clean Snowball’s cage – that hamster was the only living thing from my old life I had been permitted to bring into his grandmother’s house of the dead.

  How long would I be down here? Would I get the opportunity to feed Snowball again, call my mom tonight? The ritual had gone as such, every evening since my abduction.

  I closed my eyes again, recalling memories of being brought down here, deflowered. My hands felt so small on the Prince of the Undergound’s powerful back and biceps; his curtain of fine, dark hair falling over my naked breasts. I sat up with start and pulled white sheets around my still naked body, surprised to find the Egyptian linen strewn in rose petals. They fluttered to the floor as I called out.

  “Hello? Hayden are you there?”

  A soft female voice, then a pretty face, parted the bed curtains. She had waist length hair parted down the middle and looked so much like me, we could have been sisters. She wore a diaphanous gown of yellow – just see through enough, I could tell I was the one with bigger boobs – albeit with one breast larger than the other. I had always been self-conscious about that.

  This girl was so perfect, so symmetrical – not a hair out of place – she looked like part of a Harem Barbie Doll set. I felt even pettier, guiltier, when the strange girl curtsied, asked if there was anything I needed. On the surface we would have been equals. Here, this young girl was only a maid. My maid, apparently. She spoke like a freaking character in a Shakespeare play.

  “Your highness, I am Claudia – your handmaiden. You wed our king last night, do you not remember?”

  She helped me get out of bed and promptly began fussing over me, explaining Hayden sent her to help prepare his new bride for a dinner feast.

  “What dinner?” I asked in such a slow and confused manner, a look of panic flooded Claudia’s sweet brown eyes.

  “The wedding dinner on the surface, of course. You’re to meet his lordship’s family at The Pomegranate and hear the fool perform tonight. If you were one of us, you’d just go along with it like a robot. But look at you…”

  Claudia paused and turned my arm to look at where her king left his savage fingerprints. She stared at the hickeys purpling my neck.

  “You’re quite real, aren’t you? There is blood in this bed. You are…well, obviously, still a human. He must not have ended you yet, the way he did me…and the others,” Claudia blurted. She burst into tears.

  Seeing how upset she was, I put my hand on her quivering shoulder and urged her to be quiet, in case Hayden could hear us. Claudia listed “the others” as Cora, Pauline, Antoinette, Daphne, and Forsythia. All of them had been chosen as help mates for Hayden and Mami Wata. All had been lured down here just like me, except before they came to Hell, they sustained fatal wounds on the surface.

  Claudia said Hayden had taken all of their lives with a gun – the AR-15 I’d spotted propped against the bathtub in Mami Wata’s root cellar. How deceived I had been at first – thinking her little root cellar under that tree was just a holding pen for Fury.

  I could hear the pit bull barking, and our King soothe him. “Quiet boy, he said. “You’ll see Persephone soon enough.”

  Claudia began to dress me in front of a full length mirror, framed in gold-dipped sea shells, starfish and sand dollars. It made me sad to think these living sea creatures had been dunked in hot, molten gold and made into this. At least the mirror frames in Mami Wata’s house were just dried out beach finds.

  My dress was the same color as sand on a Caribbean island – a shimmery, white gown with two layers. The first layer was a nude, clingy dress, with a second gown of intricate lace work to go over it. I looked like ocean foam. Claudia fitted my head with a crown of sea lilies.

  “I thought Hayden was the Prince of the Underworld, not Neptune,” I mentioned to Claudia in a sarcasti
c way that made her laugh. “Does he hold a friggin’ trident instead of a scepter?” I asked.

  “You are so funny, Persephone!” Claudia chuckled. Then she gave me an education.

  “His lordship is Prince of the Dead that much is true, but he wouldn’t be anything without the power of the 7 seas at his command. His grandmother, Mami Wata is the master of those realms, and when he loses interest in all us handmaidens, we will be cast through one of the 7 portals.”

  I expressed my horror. I asked Claudia if she was afraid, and was surprised to hear quite the opposite. The Persephonies of this Underworld, made in Mami Wata’s design, looked forward to being thrown into a churning portal of sea foam and high tide. It meant they got to be mermaids – mystical beings who knew the gift of swimming through time -- forever.

  Claudia described the ceremonies she had seen of older handmaidens who had served their purpose to the Furr family and were being set free. She said Mami Wata would simply find new girls to take their place.

  “You will see the portals for yourself soon. Hayden will take you to any ocean you wish. It is your honeymoon, after all,” Claudia reasoned. “I just hope he never tires of you.”

  At this, Claudia’s mirth evaporated and she began to cry again. Seeing this range of emotion made me wonder if Hayden had missed her vital organs when he shot her. Maybe she wasn’t actually dead and we could escape together – because I did intend to escape. At the very least, I was going to school on Monday. It was Friday night on the surface, and I was starting my senior year after this very eventful, to say the least, weekend.

  Claudia ushered me out of the bed chamber and into the grand hall where Hayden – in all his muscular, Indian glory, sat on a stone throne. There was an identical ruling chair beside him, which he patted with his hand. The royal reception area was on its own stone peninsula, surrounded by dark, murky water on which a fleet of gondolas rocked gently.

  Claudia, my handmaiden, whispered in my ear that Hayden intended to row me to dinner at The Pomegranate. The canals in hell fed directly into the one where the nightclub sat.

  The other Persephonies, joined Claudia and picked up the train of my gown. We made our way down a path of fiery coals. All of us were barefoot, and I the only one who grimaced. I was the only girl here who was alive – who could still feel pain.

  Chapter

  9

  A Persephone by the name of Wanda pushed our gondola from where it had been docked. Hayden had thousands of maidens down here, where Hell was just as expansive as the real world above it.

  He rowed our boat with his powerful arms – laid bare from shoulder to wrist in the leather vest he wore. The hot Hayden gripped two oars, and as I watched him get us further out into murky waters, my heart ached from missing the awkward Hayden who lived in Mami Wata’s house.

  I decided to ask after Mami Wata as a way to break the ice. Ice. The thought was so at odds with my current situation, it made me laugh out loud.

  “What is it?” Hayden asked me. “What are you so happy about?”

  “Oh, make no mistake, I’m not happy. I was just thinking, it’s kind of chilly between you and I. You’re…..,” I paused, wondering how to put it delicately. “You’re so different down here. Like a different person from the one who lives with me at Mami Wata’s, and I was just wondering how she figures into all this. Where is Mami Wata anyway?”

  I never should have asked, because the next thing I knew I had jumped about a mile out of my skin. The boat tipped violently to its side when a large fish tail knocked into it. The mermaid who surfaced was not Mami Wata, but when it spoke to us, I still recoiled in horror.

  It had oily slick hair, sharp teeth and jagged, colorless tail. She could have cut me to ribbons if she wanted. Her hands, gripping the side of the boat had long, curling nails – the stuff of nightmares. Hayden called her Portia.

  “I was cast out today,” the mermaid said, slithering up to Hayden so he could stroke her face. There was an obvious tenderness between them. She explained herself, apologized to both of us for her hideous state.

  “The portal hadn’t closed yet, so I came back through it, looking for you. When I swim back into hell, I look terrible. Mami Wata rendered me into a beauty with long red hair and shimmery blue tail. If only you could have seen me,” the mermaid lamented.

  “But still, even if you can’t see how pretty I actually am, even if I look horrible right now, I had to see you one last time. I needed to say goodbye to you, Hayden.”

  Hayden leaned down and kissed her, so long and deep it made me uncomfortable, watching from my end of the boat, with my two human legs and marvelous long gown. Their make-out session made it easy to guess what Portia meant to my new husband once upon a time, and right after he let her go and she disappeared into the watery depths, he confirmed my suspicions.

  “Portia was one of my maidens. She was one of my first maidens. I have set her free. She has been so loyal. She fulfilled her purpose,” he said.

  “Don’t you mean her porpoise?” I joked. I may have just been imagining it – seeing what I wanted to see – but I could swear amusement drifted over Hayden’s handsome face. He decided to give me a compliment.

  “You see, I have told Mami Wata many times you are different from the others. Devastatingly clever.”

  “This is why you have to let me go back to the surface to attend school,” I pleaded. As I said it, I turned to look at what we were leaving behind. I saw other ugly mermaids, cresting the surface. Their oily hair ran past their shoulders and they waved at us. These waters were rife with old maidens of Hayden’s, all turned into Mami Wata’s likeness.

  Hayden told me his grandmother was waiting for us at The Pomegranate. When I imagined her casting me through a portal here, and into one of the seven seas where I could live an immortal life like Portia the freak, two things happened.

  One, my as of yet mortal body got goose-bumpy and nauseous from panic and fear, and, two, I kept pinching myself, hard enough to bring tears to my eyes – willing myself to swim up and out of this terrible dream, toward consciousness and my waking life on the hard floors of earth.

  I pleaded with Hayden to release me at The Pomegranate, but all he did was look me dead in the eye and reiterate what he had said before: if I left, he’d kill me and he’d go find my mother and kill her, too. I just needed to show some faith and patience, he told me, as we rowed through a pitch back tunnel. Here, all I could cling to was his deep voice.

  “We are considering, now that the summer is over, letting you return to the surface – but only for a little while,” Hayden said. “When you rejoin me in the winter, your transition will be complete. It will be final.”

  Desperate, I decided to make the case again for school – that I should be allowed to live my life on earth, well past my senior year and into some graduate program that yawned on forever, ensuring the kind of cultured, sophisticated wife he could talk to for hours.

  “If I’m to be your bride down here for all eternity, you want me to know things for heaven’s sake. You want to have something to chat about. Let me out and I swear to you, I’ll get a college degree in the most interesting thing you can think of. We can talk for hours about art history, or nuclear physics or whatever you want. Forever is a long time.”

  We rowed out of the tunnel, and I could see Hayden’s face again. He was laughing – not at my expense, but at the suggestion.

  “Darling, I’m the undead and I am pure magic. I don’t need to hear about art history, I. Am. History. Living history. In fact, I was planning on taking you through the Atlantic portal for our honeymoon. We could swim into olde Amsterdam, where I could procure for you, the finest 16th Century diamonds and emeralds.”

  I suppose this was a comfort. But what he said wasn’t what cheered me up, it was our current view. We were out of hell and I could hear human beings again. We were on the canal buffering the downtown shopping district of Ft. Lauderdale. Hayden had slowed his rowing down to just a light dip of th
e oars. We passed a water taxi docking at the Riverfront pier, and couples clinking glasses at canal side restaurants. The Pomegranate’s iridescent sign shown brighter than the full moon.

  Hayden stood in our near still boat, and tossed a rope over a fat pole at the docking station. His clothes were different since we made our passage from the Underworld. He wore a nicely tailored black suit and red tie – his long Indian hair in a ponytail but slicked back with salon product.

  I marveled at the how in that, but then again I had undergone some kind of transformation too. My bridal gown with its sea lily crown that undulated in the waves of hell beneath us, was all gone. Tonight I wore a tight, low necked cocktail dress that matched my husband’s crimson necktie.

  Two men who looked about my age, ran up to the dock to assist my getting out of the gondola. I could see they were valets who managed The Pomegranate’s parking out front. They had cranberry colored polo shirts and nametags; one told me I looked lovely tonight.

  “She is beautiful, isn’t she?” Hayden said, slipping each of the young men an enormous tip.

  It was strange to watch the valets take us in as a couple. Their mouths were agape, and it looked like one was mocking my date. Why would they look so surprised to see a guy like Hayden, with a girl like me? And then it hit me – how small and drawn he suddenly looked in his suit. The hot Indian had ceased to be the moment our feet touched land. Hayden was just Hayden again, and I couldn’t be happier.

  “Did you miss me, Persephone?” My husband winked, extending his skinny arm to me. I wrapped my own around it, pressed my breast into his side. He was a good six inches taller, and wore glasses tonight. The hard, cruel body that had rowed us all the way from Hell was gone.

  We were walking into The Pomegranate to celebrate a wedding I couldn’t remember. I savored this moment because it was the first time I didn’t want to forget.